Get together, Start moving!
Team Up!! Is a sport-community building iOS app that encourages adults to build healthy, active habits through connecting with sport communities. It allows users to self assess skills, identify the level of competition they would like to be a part of, and participate in brand new or existing active hobbies.
Project Overview:
Project Type: Academic
Timeline: (8 weeks) Feb 2023 - April 2023
Role: UX Researcher, UX/UI Designer
Tools: Figma
From Jan 2023 - April 2023, I completed a full-time UX Design Bootcamp with BrainStation to obtain a Diploma in UX Design. This 8-week capstone project was an opportunity to create a digital experience as a solution to an existing problem space. This experience was an end-to-end UX design process from research to interface design and brand development.
“Human-Centered Design” Thinking
Throughout the process of the bootcamp, the overarching theme of using the “Design Thinking Process” helped me focus to address real human needs. By following the process, I was able to leverage both my passion for sports and activity as a problem space in order to design a solution that tackles the problem space feasibly.
Empathize
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Empathize 〰️
The Problem Space
For the scope of this project, I decided to explore the problem space of physical inactivity. As someone who competes in sports regularly, I wanted to explore the barriers and challenges that adults today face in the perspective of someone that would consider themselves “not-active”.
27%
of Canadians 18 years and older, participate in sport.
Those who are sedentary are putting themselves at:
112% more likely to develop type-2 Diabetes
147% higher risk of a cardiovascular event
90% increased risk in all cause mortality.
What’s stopping them?
39% lack of info about local opportunities
37% the dollar cost of activity are too high.
33% Difficult to find others to be active with.
Design Hypothesis:
“I believe the barriers preventing Canadians from activity are a mixed bag of inaccessibility and lack of community. People will more likely choose not to learn a new sport or hobby when they are not accessible through their current social circles.”
With the secondary research in mind, I raised the initial design challenge:
Initial How Might We: “How might we reduce barriers to activity for Canadian adults to prevent the health risks associated with being sedentary?”
User Research
The method of primary research was user interviews. I interviewed 5 people with the following criteria:
Canadians aged 20-40
Those who identify with “started playing a sport or activity, and could not maintain it regularly.”
Given the time constraint, I had to narrow my participant criteria to those that have experience with physical activity before. With a second round of interviews, I would aim to gather the opinions of those who do not engage in any activity. Ideally, I would have interviewed people of all activity levels to allow for as many experiences and points of view as possible.
Themes and Insights From Primary Research
After conducting interviews, I sifted through the interview notes, classified quotes as pain points, motivations, or behaviours, and used affinity mapping to synthesize them into 4 main themes and insights.
The key theme chosen of Social Aspect/Community had the most insights and impacts in my user research and will be taken to account for design decisions going forward.
Themes
Expand for Insights
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Individuals desire a sense of community/belonging when taking on a hobby.
Being social in the chosen activity becomes a major factor in all aspects of activity. Whether its initial exposure, retention or translating levels of play (casual, recreational, intermediate, competitive). All participants felt that having a social network/group around them that caters to the specific level they wish to be at was (or would be) a great benefactor to their growth.
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Having the desired activity “easily accessible” made for more frequent play, and longer retention.
Being able to access the selected activity through your social circles/vicinity made for a positive correlation with how involve with the activity you were in. Each participant showed that with more exposure, came more opportunity to play, learn and grow amongst the community they were involved in.
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Early exposure to the activity and introducing familiarity made for easy translation to “pick up again” later in life.
Having picked up the hobby in middle/high school also made for an easier translation to pick up the same activity as an adult. The initial exposure and confidence that each participant “had done this before” made it interesting to them as an adult, and showed willingness to try again after not playing for a long time.
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Having a teacher/mentor lead to faster growth, and longer term activity retention.
Participants found that having a dedicated mentor through the process of learning or growing made it much easier to ask challenging questions and push themselves with someone looking after them.
Define
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Define 〰️
Persona:
After synthesizing themes from my primary research, I created the persona; Tiffany Chan. Tiffany represents my target user’s population, and will be central in ideating the possible solution going forward.
Experience Map
I mapped out what Tiffany’s current experience of gathering friends together to play a sport would look like to get a better understanding of where my design can intervene. After mapping out her experience, the most impactful stage for intervention showed to be the point of searching for participants, play opportunities and working around everyone’s schedules.
Ideate
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Ideate 〰️
User Stories
With the points of intervention identified in the experience map, I authored user stories to outline possible features and functions of my solution. Using my user stories, I was able to divide and categorize them into 5 epics:
Involvement with social groups and communities
Player seeking mentorship/coaching
Player rating their experiences
Player finding opportunity based on vicinity
Player understanding costs
Skill level comprehension
Chosen Epic: Involvement with Social Groups and Communities.
I believe that the strongest function can be built around assisting the user in getting in touch with a community of like-minded individuals to play and learn with. This function would also help strongly in the points of intervention found in the experience map.
Task Flow
Based on the chosen epic and user stories, I created a task flow for a feature that would allow users to connect with a community with their friends based on activity and competition level.
Solution Sketches
After developing the idea of what user’s task flow would look like, I began to sketch a rough idea of what information would be conveyed on the screens.
In this ideation process, I wanted to emphasize the ease of use by replicating video game-like UI elements and flow.
Video Games: Select a character, select a stage, play.
Team Up!!: Select a sport, Select an event, play.
Prototype
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Prototype 〰️
Wireframes
After sketching, the first mid-fidelity wireframe was created for user testing to gain feedback before committing to a high-fidelity design.
V1 Prototype main screens (L to R): Login, Main Screen, Event Selection, Event Info
Test
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Test 〰️
User Testing Round 1 Feedback
After the first round of testing, a few things were made clear:
content hierarchy is key for users to understand the importance of each step.
the “chip/pill system” was unclear to users as to their meaning without clearly defining what each level meant.
The layout of the home/main page was not as clear as I would like for it to be for users.
After synthesizing the feedback, revisions were made and a second round of testing was conducted.
Prototype V2
Revisions after the first round of testing were implemented and a second round of testing was conducted.
V2 Prototype Screens (L to R): Login Screen, Main Screen, Event Selection, Event Info Screen
User Testing Round 2 Feedback
After a second go-around at user testing, I knew the changes I made had a subtle impact on the user experience. Most notably, the chips system was more visible in indicating competition level. However a few more learnings occurred during the second user test:
Despite having a persona and situation prior to testing, users found themselves exploring on the homepage without a proper onboarding process.
The order of having to invite a friend before confirming an event seemed redundant since the friend may not be available once confirmed.
Most notably, a few testers noted that the task flow itself is taking too many steps to get to the end result of confirming an event.
After the second round of testing, I had enough feedback to align my high-fidelity solution to solve the initial problem. After revising my prototype for a third time, I set out to inject colour, branding and animations to the High-Fidelity mockup.
High Fidelity Prototype
After synthesizing the minor changes from the second round testing, one more major change was added to the task flow to introduce more clarity.
Design Iteration V2 to Hi-Fi
The higher impact, higher effort change that came from the second round testing was the lack of a proper onboarding for the application. This was implemented to introduce the user to the app and it’s functions once logged in. Additionally, a revised task flow for the new version was created.
Updated task flow for High-Fidelity Prototype
The impact of the onboarding process upon initial startup opened up the “ease of use” avenue for future considerations. After completing the onboarding and populating the homepage with the desired activities, the task flow will now be simplified to the following:
Brand Expansion
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Brand Expansion 〰️
Marketing Site
To bring Team Up!! further to market, a responsive Website/Mobile site was designed to communicate value through a feature showcase.
Exploring Across Platforms
Team Up!! As a kiosk:
As another means of concept exploration, another consideration for Team Up!! would be as a kiosk in a community centre/park. Given that places offer the event and sporting space, it seemed natural that areas that would cater to hosting sporting events would have a way to gather users together of similar play level. However, the task flow would be reimagined to lend itself to the events available based on location.
Imagined main screen for YMCA kiosk
Next Steps and Future Thinking
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Next Steps and Future Thinking 〰️
Design Impact
When my solution is implemented, it will affect the users within the problem space of inactivity through encouragement and community. Those that would not have considered trying a new sport due to lack of resources or network would have the opportunity to do so through the use of this solution.
Before my design intervention, finding both the people and gauging the interest before finding a venue was a dauting process, especially for those who are new to a sport. My solution hopes to engage more people in activity and grow communities through convenience and community exposure.
Key Learnings
Be open to ideating as openly as possible before prototyping: From the get-go I was very solution oriented, I had an idea of where I wanted the product to go before synthesizing research. This proved to backfire come the point where ideation came into play since most of my biases were proven wrong through the interview process.
The “Minimum Viable Product” is not the goal, but a checkpoint: Going through the whole design thinking process, and iterating countless amount of times come the prototyping stage; I was under the assumption that the next step will “always follow up and improve where you left off".” That definitely wasn’t the case, and going forward, it’s definitely more of a “best foot forward, and admit when I’m beat” approach.
Prod your user tests endlessly: Don’t assume what your user testers are doing for face value, always question why and what they are thinking. What seems straightforward at first, may not seem so. In my case, my second round of user testing went seamlessly, until my last test really dug into their thought process which made me question if every other tester felt the same way.
Iteration doesn’t mean you were wrong the first time, it means there’s always room for improvement: In going from my V2 mid-fidelity prototype to the high-fidelity, I found myself redesigning the entire app both visually and contextually. I felt like my first go around at the prototypes were wrong and I was just backtracking my progress back to a regressed design. Knowing that those changes were not a fall back on the initial design, but a step forward after learning from user tests helped me press onwards entirely.
Next Steps
Having tackled the most impactful epic of “Social Aspect in Sport” serves as a great starting point in ideating for a more fleshed-out solution. Going forward, it would make sense to consider the other epics found in the define stage of: “Finding Mentorship” or “Increasing Accessibility”. I believe one thing that was not considered in the task flow was the different styles of learning, and opening new avenues to find mentorship through the app or show more routes for an education based experience rather than a community one would be valuable to the user groups.
Future Thinking: Tarot Cards of Tech
“The Smash Hit”
What happens if 100 million people use your product?
Having a much larger scale userbase would definitely be the ideal outcome, in doing so there will be:
a much more robust library of activities and communities open to growth and competition
much more opportunities for play for all levels of competition regardless of users’ level.
“The Backstabber”
What could cause people to lose trust in your product?
In this case, I believe that continuous bad experiences from the user end could result in a user losing trust in the product. In which a consideration for a future flow would be to add a rating system. This would allow users and hosts to communicate the value of their events while still aiming to improve it for future considerations.
“The Forgotten”
When you picture your user base, who is excluded? If they used your product, what would their experience be like?
A user group that wasn’t considered in this product iteration and flow was; those that aren’t interested in activity altogether. Due to time constraints, my initial primary research was done with those that have experience in activity purposefully to avoid blockers. In the future, to flesh out the project further and reach a greater audience, I would like to research the point of view of those who reject sports and activity definitely and see if there’s a way to reach out to that audience.