UX/UI Design

rec.connect is an app that facilitates volunteer engagement in recreational sports by connecting volunteers with opportunities in their area.

Project Type: SPRINT

Role: UX Researcher, Brand Strategy

(Team Members: Alex Bradly, Ethan Van Sant, and Sharan Rana)

Timeline: 4 Days (April 2021)

Artifacts: Flows, Grayscale Wireframes, Hi-Fidelity Screens

Tools: Figma, Zoom, Dribbble

Skills + Methods: Interviews, Usability testing, Qualitative Research, Experimenting, UX + UI Design

View High-Fidelity Prototype

THE CHALLENGE

For this project my school (BrainStation) partnered with TheScore, a Canadian based company that operates digital sports media and sports betting products, to present us with a challenge of completing a FOUR Day Sprint. To get us started they provided us with a few tools:

Problem Space:

Using technology, how might we find new and engaging ways to connect people through recreational sports?

How Might We:

HMW...leverage technology to create a sense of community and beloning through recreational sports?

Constraints:

Our solution must be accessible to the widest audience, to present our solution we will have an 8 minute time constraint, and we must follow these branding guidelines:

THE SPRINT PROCESS

The design Sprint framework was created by Jake Knapp from Google Ventures. It is an innovative and fast-forwarded take on developing a design solution and design thinking. The original breakdown can be seen to the right. (a)

For the BrainStation x TheScore sprint we had to adjust according to our schedule and restructure our sprint process, including the presentation of our solution, into only FOUR days.

DAY 1

Secondary Research

To kick things off, my team and I conducted some secondary research. We educated ourselves on the context of the problem, any recent innovations, as well as any key market players that are affected by the problem space (the need to increase engagement in recreational sports). From our findings we discovered that:

Recreational sports rely heavily on volunteers (Coaches, Referees, Officials, Administrators). (b)

People feel more comfortable in a program led by sports leaders and coaches with whom they can relate. (b)

Fostering an environment where everyone feels welcome and encouraged to participate in sports requires knowledgeable sports instructors. (b)

With these factors in mind we found it important to gather some quantitative data to represent why volunteerism is so important within recreational sports. We found a pretty interesting statistic...

If this trend continues, the gap between supply of volunteers and demand of volunteers increases by a full percentage point each year. This gap will exponentially increase if there is no action taken. (c+d)

Goal Setting

Because we were proposing our solution to an actual company we found it fitting to provide some project goals as well as some business related goals that are important to keep in mind as we bring our solution to fruition.

Primary Research

We interviewed 5 individuals who...live in North America, Fall between the ages of 20-60 years old, and have played organized sports. After sucessfully conducting our interviews we discovered valuable motivations, behaviors, and pain points..

Refined How Might We

To refine our HMW, we individually created a variety of potential directions we could take in the realm of volunteerism, while keeping the valuable insights we received from primary research in mind. We then utilized affinity mapping and dot voting (heat map) to narrow down our options. After we grouped the HMW's into themes we then allowed each team member to acquire 3 dots which was used for voting.

After this exercise we were able to restructure our HMW question:

"How might we make the search process of finding volunteer opportunities more efficient for potential volunteers with sports knowledge, so that, volunteerism in recreational sports increases to match participation?"

Target Selection

We asked ourselves..what is the most critical moment in the users experience? To answer this question we came together to write up a user journey which allowed us to pinpoint where our HMW question and solution would come into play.

Primary Persona

Drawing from our secondar and primary research as well as our refined how might we question focusing around volunteerism we were able to answer the question...who is the most important target user? We came together to craft the primary persona of Timothy.

DAY 2

Inspiration & Ideation

Day 2 was all about finding inspiration and building upon our Day 1 research to create a solution. We took the first hour to do some exploring and created a collection of components and features we thought would make sense or that we could draw inspiration from (Utilizing Dribbble and Google Search). In addition, we looked for pre-existing products that were geared towards recreational sports or volunteering in general to analyze how they tackled their problem space.

Sketching to Find the Solution

We approached the sketches portion of the design process with a strong sense of collaboration and consideration for eachothers ideas. First, we all developed our own flow of what we thought would be the most efficient process of finding volunteer opportunities. We then carried over the dot voting (heat map) method except this time we gave each other 10 dots each to vote for specific screens. We were allowed to vote for a screen more than once and we were also allowed to vote for our own creations. After reviewing the most popular screens and an effective discussion we tied together a few screens from everyone's flow to create our finalized baseline.

DAY 3

Grayscale Wireframes

After working together to decide on the flow we wanted to focus on my team developed some solid grayscale wireframes.

User Testing

Due to our limited time constraint of 4 days we were only able to conduct 1 round of user testing with 5 participants. In addition, we conducted our user testing in hi fidelity instead of grayscale which usually would have allow more foucs on the functionality of the prototype. Despite all of this we were still able to receive quality feedback to implement into our final prototype.

Grayscale to Hi-Fidelity

When I was in the process of making UI Design decisions I was continuously looking for feedback from my peers and educators. After much experimentation and a little bit of tweaking, I present to you the finalized design of the SYNC app. If you are interested in the interactive prototype please click on the link below.

View Hi-Fidelity Prototype

FORWARD THINKING

Next Steps

My team and I found it important to dream big and think about what the future could look like for rec.connect.

Overall Impact

Rec.connect will postively impact the world of recreational sports. Increasing engagment by spreading awareness of volunteer opportunities for all ages.

Key Learnings

Completing a 4-Day sprint was quite a challenge. I am grateful to have been able to work with such a brilliant, open minded, and kind team. It was a valuable experience that influenced us to really go out of our comfort zones, especially regarding the time constriant.