Sportyfide | Product Design Case Study
Overview
Nowadays, everything from dining reservations to plane tickets are booked at our fingertips and yet people fond of sports either can’t find fields, courts, tables, etc., to play, or they have to wait for hours to get their chance to play since the arena is already occupied.
So what is the actual problem here? There ain’t enough fields, or we simply can’t negotiate timings with strangers?
During my internship at a design studio, I got this exciting project where our client came up with a great idea of using school fields after lunchtime and other existing dedicated sports academies for renting the arena to play respected games.
Problem Statement
Most of us have at least one sport that help us find inner peace or satisfaction, but as the world progresses, the residential spaces have become more dense, leaving less open spaces around to play.
Design an interface that lets users book an arena/court/table for outdoor and indoor games.
Design Process
I decided to follow the Human Centered Design process for designing this project, This will ensure that it starts with people and ends with innovative solution tailored to the user’s need. Every decision should be supported by user feedback and a continuous validation process to smoothen the user journey further.
Identifying the Users
At times where Metaverse is already ringing the bell and people are more inclined towards mobile phones, PCs, PlayStation etc. There is still a subtle need to feel the touch of chess board, sweat under the sun, feel the joy of winning a match. Such people who take time out for playing any sport occasionally are our target audience for this application.
User: People aging 18–40 years old tech savvy and have interest in at least one sport
Market: Young population in Metro cities.
Application Flow
I have bifurcated the venue booking process into multiple steps and users' expectations in respective phases.
These steps include things that might take place out side the app; Also, keeping track of the overall process helps us to save some time at user’s end, like calculating everyone’s share in the booking or sharing UPI for payments.
User Goals
Pain Points
Wireframing
I then prepared the paper wireframes on the basis of above application flow and asked couple of my friends to complete simple tasks like:
- Select a sport, set a location and then search for a venue at the location.
- Booking the venue for a particular time period.
- Splitting bill between those who collectively booked the venue.
- Extend/edit an existing booking etc.
It was such a fun process 😂, while sometimes people would baffle at things that I thought were plain and simple at other time they would smile when they understood a logic or discovered any feature in particular.
This overall journey helped me to simplify the flow and gave me many ideas to smoothen the overall process.
Working on Challenges
1. Personalizing the first experience of the users
When the users use the app for the first time, the app needs the list of sports a user plays and the current location so that the first interaction with the Home page can be personalized and thus the user can access suitable venues for their favorite sport at the first glance.
2. One Glance Availability of Venues
Several factors that came out from the research phase, that users check to choose a particular venue included:
- Location (Distance),
- Pricing,
- Availability on a particular day,
- Reviews,
- Amenities available at the venue.
3. Choosing a venue
While booking a hotel room, we don't just look at the room; rather, we check for various amenities like the view from the window, Quality of room services, food facilities, the overall charisma etc.
Similarly, In this case the end goal while booking an arena is not just getting a place to play, but also includes various surrounding elements and other factors apart from booking details like:
- Pictures of the place
- Basic amenities
- Sports equipment available
- Time slots when arena is operational
- Past Reviews etc.
4. Booking process
After deciding the venue comes the most important part of the whole journey, i.e. The booking itself, and this is where a lots of users drops off, if things even slightly go wrong hence breaking the task of booking into smaller tasks lets users to subconsiously cherish completion of the process.
This phase extends from asking friends about their plans to reaching the venue and having an urge to extend the booking at the end, and others like:
- Unavailability of time slots
- Uncertainty of how many people would join
- Difficulty in payments
- Urge to read refund policy
5.Sharing and splitting the bill with friends
Once booking is complete, A user can split the bill between friends or teams, where they can put number of people that will be pooling together and share the venue details along with their share.
Assumption: User has already confirmed with his/her friends who are going to join and have shared multiple venue for confirmation.
6. Extending the booking
Its an edge case where users might be enjoying their play and want to extend their booking; it’s very common because several games can take much more time than expected to complete (Including the fact that sometimes we don't want to give up playing :p).
Joining Every Puzzle piece
My Takeaways
Designing Sportyfide has been an enriching experience for me as I learnt identifying the target audience and their specific needs, pain points, and expectations. This helped me to design a user-friendly interface that caters to the unique requirements of the users.
The wireframing and prototyping process allowed me to test and validate the design at various stages. This iterative process enabled me to create an optimal user experience and ensure the design meets users’ expectations.
Overall, this project taught me valuable lessons in user experience design, problem-solving, and iterative design. It has helped me to become a better designer by providing me with hands-on experience in designing a product from ideation to the final product.
