01.

The research

Sportify's journey began with market research in Macedonia, a country with a high demand for sports apps due to its active population. Competitor analysis revealed a gap in the market – while fitness apps existed, none offered a complete social media platform for all sports. Exciting news for Sportify! 🚀

Next, I connected with the core target audience through interviews, diving into their sports habits, needs, and desires. Armed with valuable insights, it was time to kickstart the design thinking process! 🎯🤔

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02.

Design Thinking Process

User Personas

The interviews helped me identify the common pain points, which things frustrate and block the uses from getting what they need from their desired sports activities. So, I applied all the findings and segmented them into 4 key user personas.

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Empathy Mapping

The next step was to categorize the research notes from the user interview and extract some conclusions for the behavior of the user personas. I needed to know what drives users’ behaviors which would guide me towards meaningful innovation for the design process.

The conclusion was that most of the users share the same pain points:

1. Trouble organizing a game
They can't find people that would be free at the same time and location for the sports the want to play.

2. Can't find the right people
They have a hard time finding the right teammates with the right personality for them.

3. Lack of good digital sports apps/platforms
People generally feel there is a lack of quality sports apps in Macedonia. They are frustrated with their bad user experience, while having to see too much ads when navigating through them.

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‍Informational Architecture

After creating the user personas, I moved on to mapping how features, options and profiles were going to be structured together harmoniously. Using card sorting, I narrowed down all chunks that are crucial for our product as a whole in order to gain a better understanding of what is most important.

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03.

Ideation

After the conducted research I learned that users prefer simple user flow. Users should be able to quickly select from a list of events, matches and players to get the information they need in real time. It also helps if there are less steps and fewer screens involved. This will result in increased engagement as there is less friction for users to navigate and get to where they want to go.

After agreeing on the user flow with the Sportify team, we had the final look almost ready.

But we were missing the magic moment, something that would boost the engagement and make the whole user experience a lot more interesting.

In general, player behavior is driven by their perceived measures of success. Together with the Sportify team, we hypothesized that a point system that rewards players for actions like matches played and good reviews will be a great motivator for participating on the platform. By rewarding players for certain actions with points, we can increase the sense of accomplishment and drive engagement with our platform.

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