What does a Football Pokédex feel like?
Part 3 in a series on how I’m designing a Companion App for Sports Interactive’s Football Manager
Other parts on this series:
Alright, so after a super extended holiday with mum, dad and nan, I’m back. And it’s time to actually figure out how the companion app will be used and navigated. Part 3 of the Google Venture’s Design Sprint is Deciding, using what’s already been sketched out during the brainstorming sessions and actually zeroing in on an idea.
Conflicts
I started by mapping out the conflicts that were problematic and appeared during the Crazy-8s and storyboards.
Navigation
From the sketching I did, I had three main ideas for navigation within the app. I could do tabs at the bottom, like Apple does in their native apps; I could do tabs at the top with swiping, like Google does with their native apps; or I could use a side bar as a menu, like Spotify does, for example. This is simply what I sketched out, and there are probably other ways to do this, so I’ll tackle this later.
Club page
When looking at a club, what does the user see first? The club’s information, such as name, badge, value, president, manager and etc? Or the list of the players currently in that club? Or even both?
Country browsing
Will the user browse by league or by player nationality? This one is easy, since browsing by player nationality implies previous knowledge from the user, and that’s not good. I wanted to do some thorough research but this seems like common sense, it’s a lot easier to browse by league, and it’s also more relevant considering the intentions of the user with the app. I only had to ask a couple of friends who are potential users if they would rather browse by league or nationality, and it was a given that, while it would be cool to have both systems, browsing by league is way more important. So that’s that.
Assumptions
Users will use the shortlist feature to create custom shortlists. I’m assuming this is the most important feature, and that, without it, users wouldn’t pick up the app more than once.
Users are interested in finding a player they already know. I’m considering that the app’s main purpose is not filtering players by age or position (even though that’s a cool feature that could be added in the future), but instead, to search by name or team.
These are the assumptions I will be taking into consideration for the purpose of this design study. I’m not even thinking about licensing, so I’m assuming I can use the player’s likeness and the badge of every club. I also don’t know if the database is local, if it’s online, if it’s updated or how it’s updated. So I’m assuming it’s a fixed database, based on FM16. This means I’m also not thinking of a way to store all the photos and badges, or how big that file would be, or even if I’ll just fetch it from an online source. This is a design study, but I like thinking about real world scenarios anyway, I just won’t be applying them here, at the moment.
User Stories Storyboards
I did a pretty complete storyboard of all the user stories that came up during part 2 of this process, which were:
- I want to search a player by their name;
- I want to browse the continents, countries, leagues and clubs until I find the player I’m looking for;
- I want to view a player’s complete profile
- I want to view a club’s complete profile
- I want to create shortlists for my favourite players
- I want to add as many players as I like to my shortlists
- I want to edit my shortlists information and players
Whew! I guess I was on fire and just kept going, but that was actually amazing because it allowed me to really look deep into what the app would feel like, and how a user would navigate through it and use it. It also opened my eyes to other conflicts and design decisions, so doing this was very fruitful.
Next step
For the next step I’ll be diverging a bit from the Design Sprint process. Sketching out the storyboards made me realize I needed to look into some specific screens because of the amount of information that’ll be displayed. I’ll be pairing this with the current Information Visualization course I’ve been taking online at the Interaction Design Foundation, and write about that, specifically.
Disclaimer: I’m in no way affiliated to Sports Interactive. This is a personal project and a design concept. Football Manager is very dear to my heart and I love data visualization design, so why not study both at the same time?
