Creating a professional experience for amateur athletes.
Overview
As an avid pickup basketball player, I was curious about how technology could be used to improve game performance. This curiosity led me to design a web platform where users can track their scoring performance, as well as their teammates and opponents. I named this web platform PickUp.
While playing in a pickup game, I found it difficult to track how many shots I was making in comparison to how many I took. When sitting out, I tried to track the stats of my friends with a notes app but found it challenging to keep up with just the keyboard. With the text being so small it took a lot of precision and scrolling to update the players stats.
Research
Before starting any design work, I reached out to my fellow players to get a grasp on what they would hope to gain from having their stats tracked.
Key Excerpts from interviews:
- “I would love to be able to see how I’m shooting so I can see if I improve over time”
- “Having my stats tracked would let me see if I played well and I would feel like an NBA player”
- “It would give me a new way to be competitive by bragging to my friends”
Understanding who my users would be, I wanted to take my interviews and develop a target persona for this app by highlighting their Goals, Wants, Needs, and Fears.
Goals
Show your statistical growth in basketball games.
Wants
To review stats over a select period of time.
Needs
To track and display your points and field goal percentage in a pickup game.
Fears
They won't be able to track their progress.
With an outline for who my user was, I continued on my journey to build this app. My ambition and creativity often gets the best of me, so I wanted to make sure this was a project that I could publish. I wanted to define the scope for this project so I could build it incrementally and bring an MVP to launch as soon as possible. To do so I created a MoSCoW list to inform my release schedule, and focused on the Must Haves for my MVP
Must Have
Ability to track stats for the pick up game.
Should Have
The ability to share the results of the game on socials.
The ability to make a profile to save your results over a period of time.
Could Have
Stats for pickup, amateur leagues, and/or school games saved to your profile.
Wont Have
Substitutions, teams, anything beyond an amateur or pickup capacity.
Ideation
With my scope in place, I moved on to the next step of building the product. I wanted to map out the steps the user would go through and through a flow diagram, I was able to scope out what could be the minimum viable product.
The most crucual part of the MVP would be to actually input the game stats per player, so I needed to brainstorm and explore potential ideas of how this could be. I drafted some rough wireframes to explore potential interfaces for the stat tracker module that looked simple and easy to use.
Prototype
Handoff
As the sole developer on the project, I wanted to create a smooth development process for myself. I handed off the prototypes into Zeplin, and created cheat sheets for different components used in the app. I seamlessly organized and annotated each element, giving myself a comprehensive overview of the project. Zeplin's intuitive interface allowed me to view detailed specifications, pixel-perfect measurements, and style guides, ensuring precision in the implementation of the design.
Field testing
With a coded prototype, I brought the platform to a game to conduct more testing in a game environment. Players were initially hesitant about the product but were excited once they realized they no longer had to worry about score checks and could just play the game.
My participants noted that with the fast pace of the game it was hard to make sure you were pressing the right button and would mis-click on a non-clickable space, frustrating them to look away from the game and find what they had to click. Their main concern was that they were missing out data they would have to input and the results would be inaccurate.
This feedback had me reconsider the method of interaction for the score tracker module. Rather than having multiple buttons for the user to interact with, I modified it to be a singular button that updated based on a single click or a double click. A key consideration was that device accessibility as important, people don't typically bring their laptops to pickup games. With this feedback, I pivoted to a mobile first design approach.
Final designs
Conclusions
Many projects I've delivered ended with a complete handoff, this is a project I want to deliver and continue to develop after it's live. Being able to go beyond user testing and try it out in the field was an amazing experience, one I hope to continue as the product develops.
Stay tuned for more updates!