In a span of 5 days, I collaborated with three UX designers on a digital solution for the digital media company, theScore. How do we connect individuals through recreational sports, especially those who work from home? We designed REConnect, a mobile app for organized sports leagues to connect users with other people.
Even in the remote, work-from-home environment we find ourselves living in, there is an opportunity to connect individuals through recreational sports. How do we leverage technology to create a sense of community & belonging? We explored apps that offered social connection or recreational sports to identify any missing gaps to validate designing our own.
We saw an opportunity to create a more appealing digital solution for recreational sports. But first, we needed to assume what our target user's current experience were. Thus, we quickly mapped out various routes that the user would take to engage in recreational sports with others.
The user map contained multiple routes/steps that led to the same goal. However, were our assumptions of the mapping correct? To confirm this, we interviewed three people who were familiar with recreational sports, and found three common themes.
Since these themes aligned so closely with one another, it allowed us to focus in on a potential solution. To guide our decisions, we wondered:
Before we jumped into any designs, we created a persona to sum up our findings, highlighting the goals and pain points. An experience map was also created to understand what steps are currently taken to participate in organized, recreational sports.
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We identified a point in the experience map where the persona felt overwhelmed with their current experience of finding recreational sports leagues. Therefore, we designed a task flow for a digital solution to address this frustration. This mobile app provides users to different leagues, allows them to register for teams, invite friends and connect with their teammates.
For consistency among all sprint teams, a set of design guidelines were provided. Following the task flow, we began sketching app screens that turned into hi-fidelity wireframes. We ended up with REConnect, a play on the words 'recreational sports' and 'connect'. Our persona now has a central hub that allow them to connect with others through different recreational sports leagues.
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To ensure REConnect turned out to be the digital solution we intended to address the problem space, we conducted usability testing. Based on the feedback, we made these minor iterations, as meeting the end-user's wants & needs are important to deliver an enjoyable user experience.
This design sprint was an opportunity to utilize my soft skills to work among a team of other designers: collaboration, active listening, etc. This led to a successful sprint, where we effectively made use of each day to design a user-centric digital solution.
