Mobile App for Finding and Organizing Pick Up Sports
Our individual class project was to identify a problem in our neighborhood and create a solution for it. The problem I chose to focus on was helping people in my community find others to play pick up team sports with. The processes I have engaged in to develop my design were: brainstorming, interviews, competitive analysis, personas, sketches, paper prototypes.
The final project was an interactive mobile app protoype which I designed using Axure.
Below are some highlights of my design process.
Competitive Analysis
Meetup.com is one of the top ways people use to find pick up sport games.
Competitive Analysis (pdf)Brainstorming
Sketches of brainstorming solutions for finding and organizing pick up sport games.
Interviews
I conducted one on one interviews with 4 people, 2 of which tend to organize games, and 2 of which tend to join games. By showing them my brainstorming sketches, I was able to identify attractive features and less attractive features. The most attractive feature was a real-time map view of the number of people playing pick up sports nearby. I was also able to identify that people use email, text or facebook to organize future pick up sport games. Individuals tend to find out about local recreation drop in facilities, leagues and classes through word of mouth.
Paper Prototype
I performed user testing of my paper prototypes on fellow classmates which helped me determine that my home screen had too many buttons. I decided to restructure my home page to be a list of upcoming games to encourage engagement and I re-organized my buttons into a main set of top level buttons which contained sub-menu options.
Paper Prototypes (pdf)
Presentation and Walk Through of Mobile App
Walk through of digital prototype (pdf)
Sample Screenshots
Final Interactive Prototype created using Axure
Final Project Report
Some future things to be implemented:
- how to handle and prevent no-shows
- ability to view past events (helps people know where and when sports are typically played)
- ability to "check-in" at a sport location (essentially this information is available if the person has joined an existing game, but my thought was it would be nice to have another ability to track number of people at a nearby drop in gym or field)
- filter on forum and map (in the event that there is too much information, it would be nice to have an ability to filter)
- group messaging (A lot of people I interviewed use email or group text messaging to organize pick up sports)
- notification settings
- ability to form groups of friends (typically it's easier to reach out to people you've already played with to initiate a new game)