Empowering Aspiring Sports Students From Remote Areas Get Access To Quality Coaching & Mentorship
Get Closer To Your Big Dream✨
Problem Context:- The sheer diversity of sports in India is a reflection of the country’s rich culture and heritage. From traditional tribal games to mainstream sports, there is something for everyone in India. The nation’s love for various sporting categories is truly astounding. various sports ranging from cricket, soccer, hockey, badminton, etc.. (the list is long) are played in every nook & corner of this great land promoting a sense of unity & national pride.
Despite having such superabundant sports history, the Million $ question is -
Why Do We Fail To Produce More Medal-Winning Athletes?
It’s important to note that Indian athletes are no slouches. There are many factors that may explain India’s underperformance on the big stage & one of the most important factors in them is — these aspiring sports students lack coaching & mentorship who can nurture & groom talent.
🧪 The Anti-Dote:-
As a part of the cohort, I got an assignment to list down 30 pet peeves that I came across or have seen people facing the problem & out of those, I decided to go with this problem specifically because I thought solving this problem can create social impact at scale from both sides — Aspiring sports students as well as coaches.
But………
🌟Is this problem worth solving?
To check this, I created a poll & posted it on my social networks like Twitter & LinkedIn.
🚧Unfortunately, I didn’t receive that much response on basis of which I will directly start solving this problem.
Therefore, I decided to explore this problem space deeper & hence, I took the help of the design process to structure my thought process & explore, delve deeper & wider into the problem space as well as understand the current market situation & let know that, is it just me who is thinking the problem exists or is there any real need for it in the market.
⚗️Design Process -
1. 🔭Discover:-
A. 📜Secondary Research -
I thought it would be a good start to tackle this problem by having a broad overview of the field & existing resources & market conditions which would permit me to synthesize findings & unwrap areas where additional research is needed.
Also, To understand my problem and make better decisions, I looked through many online materials such as research papers, technical articles, journals & case studies to find different viewpoints on this issue. I found it helpful when it came down to exploring my problem space, as well as ascertaining how much demand there would be for such a unique problem.
Here are some of the snippets of the secondary research -
In a similar manner, I collected, analyzed & categorized the secondary research data into themes so that, I would be able to synthesize the information in a more organized & structured manner & hence, in this phase I got the validation that, YES…This is the problem that can be solved at scale & I should go ahead & explore, and deep dive into this problem.
👉 Here are the resources that helped me to validate this problem
Along with secondary research, I wanted to know if there is a strong business opportunity that exists in this problem or not & here are some of the key insights I found out -
Although, rather than reinventing the wheel, secondary research helped me to identify some of the answers & resolve some doubts about this kind of new & unexplored topic for me but -
1️⃣ The data collected from the resources were limited with respect to insights & viability as well as I was not that much sure of credibility.
2️⃣ As the sports industry is a rapidly evolving field, I was not sure how much these insights are still relevant today.
Through competitor analysis, I wanted to understand -
- The current market scenario thoroughly.
- Better frame my UX Design decisions as well as develop a better product than the current ones.
- Get familiar with the strengths & weaknesses of my existing competition (If any).
- Find out if there is any breach in the market.
🛸Insights got from competitive analysis -
- Unfortunately, in India, There are only a couple of apps that are solving this niche problem that too in a different manner (e.g. training academies nearby your area or just having the option to see recorded videos).
- There is no app which is focusing on a variety of sports & creating personalized experiences as per the player’s interests.
- There are a couple of apps (which are not operated in India) that are solving this problem from the coach’s side. But they are only limited to managing the team & administrative kind of services.
- The UX & visuals of these apps were not that great & users were screaming out of frustration to make things better or asking for refunds of their payments.
Here are some of the screenshots from the Play Store about the existing apps & the major issues associated with them -
C. 👥Primary Research:-
To overcome some of these limitations associated with secondary research & in order to gain fresh data as well as to gain a better understanding of my target market’s barriers, pain points, users’ attitudes, triggers, and behavioral patterns I decided to go with ‘Primary Research.’
I divided the process into two phases -
📑 User Survey -
The main purpose of conducting the user survey was -
1. Recruiting participants who are spread across segments, locations & geographies for moderated in-depth user interviews.
2. Collecting honest & unbiased feedback from my target audience.
3. To make informed decisions to get a rough idea of why something is happening or to get to know about frictions that my target audience is experiencing rather than relying on assumptions.
While keeping best practices for conducting a UX survey in mind, I developed an inclusive process composed of both open-ended and close-ended questions for my particular target market audience and conducted the survey by sharing it with the respective WhatsApp groups, Reddit communities & other social media channels & communities where my users were known to congregate.
I got great success this time & the results were great (150 people visited the survey, 99 started filling it & 70 people were trickled down to the final question with a 70% completion rate).
Now I decided to start taking user interviews as I had some insights & quantitative data about my users, their psychographics as well as demographics.
💭User Interviews -
By having direct conversations with users I wanted to unravel new opportunities, engage with my users & dig into their pain points, barriers, needs, emotions & attitudes as well as all the insights which are directly from users’ mouths that cannot be justified in numbers
But, when I opened the statistics of my survey, most of that target audience preferred to stay anonymous & didn’t fill in their contact details. So, I could only reach out to the students who have filled in the details & started explaining to them what I am trying to do & would they be comfortable having 1:1 conversations with me about the same.
But, most of them were not ready & I was really nervous that, how I can bring in some participants for the interviews. Fortunately, 3 of the participants agreed & I conducted my interviews with them & thanks to them, they referred me to some more students who were felling in my criteria for the survey & interview.
To conduct user interviews I prepared the user interview guide & while preparing this, I asked the following questions myself -
- What do I need to know about my users?
- How will that knowledge help me improve my design decisions & design process?
I divided the user interview guide into 3 parts -
In this way, I carried out interviews with 6 participants & noted down all the intricate details, their pain points & any surprising fact that I came across while interviewing them.
Here are some of the most important questions I asked them focusing on their behaviors, past history & motivations.
💡These are some of the major insights & quotes I gathered while empathizing with my target audience
Based on the ‘Secondary Research’ & ‘Primary Research’, I created a storyboard to get more empathized with my users & clearly understand their pains & barriers.
🗺️Affinity Mapping -
When I was done conducting my survey & research, I got a lot of data scattered across my notes & Fig Jam. Therefore, to organize the data & to make this whole set of data easier to comprehend, grasp & connect as well as bring some hidden insights into the light that would have been hard to recognize, I did Affinity mapping & clustered the similar data.
By doing ‘Affinity Mapping’, I converted my raw data into themes & insights as well as got a clear picture of what my data is trying to tell me -
🎬Concluding My Research:-
2. 🎯 Define:-
🙋♂️Persona -
Talking with real users helped me to gain a deeper understanding of their behavior, pain points, needs & motivations & after that I decided to create a ‘Persona’ so that this raw data can be converted into representations of my target audience & also it would also help to make sense of all the data & scope down a little bit.
Now, I had a good idea about who my users are. I was ready to convert this analysis into synthesis so that, I would be able to articulate my design problem in a better way & in turn this problem statement would help me to guide my ideation process with clear-cut objectives.
3. 🪄Ideation:-
After creating a focused problem statement, I wanted to come up with innovative & new solutions & ‘Ideation’ process allowed me to explore new territories by thinking aloud & it allowed me to transition between understanding the pain points, and problems users have & creating potential solutions for the problem.
I divided the ideation process into 4 phases -
A. 📖User Stories
B. 🔮Deriving Features
C. 🏗️Information Architecture
D. ⚒️ Wireframing
A. 📖User Stories
To arrive at the most optimal solution, I wrote the user stories based on the user goals as well as to better understand the reason behind users wanting a certain solution.
B. 🔮Deriving Features
From ‘User Stories’, it got clear to me that, what features my app would be having & while deriving features, I took the help of the MOSCOW (Must have, should have & could have) framework to make sure that I find out & prioritize the main features. In this way, I was able to figure out around 20 features & out of them, I prioritized only 3 to 4 features & also tried to combine some of the auxiliary must-have features into the prioritized ones.
👉 (Here is the link to the ‘Deriving Features’ document)
C. 🏗️Information Architecture
To properly lay out my product’s hierarchy and features as well as streamline the flow of the information, content inside my application & bird’s eye view of how the information in my potential solution would look like, I started out framing ‘Information Architecture.
After 2 iterations of framing IA, I decided to go with this -
Link for my 1st & 2nd iterations for Information Architecture — IA 01 & IA 02
D. ⚒️ Wireframing
I started my ‘Wireframing’ stage with ‘Crazy 8s’ which helped me to sketch out 8 distinctive ideas in 8 minutes & generate a wide variety of solutions to push beyond some of my first ideas.
Based on this exercise, I got an initial idea of what should be the rough structure of my app & hence I have started thinking about a rough blueprint of my design decisions that would get reflected on the screens in the form of features, behaviors & expectations (How the potential user will react with the product), content & information hierarchy.
📱From Paper To Digital -
Now, that I have laid out all the foundations & have a clear blueprint of what exact problem needs to be solved, how it needs to be solved & what should be the structure of my application, let’s proceed toward high-fidelity designs.
4. 🚀 Let’s Design -
🎨Laying The Foundations -
While designing my high fidelity UI, I had to went through a lot of iterations & feedback & first, I would like to show you my final designs & gradually we’ll come back to how I went through my 1st iteration, 2nd iteration & final design after Usability Testing.
🛷Onboarding:-
〰️Onboarding Flow:-
🏠Home Section:-
🪐Explore Section:-
📹Record Section:-
⛳Leaderboard:-
5. ➿Usability Testing & Iterations In Design:-
After designing, to learn about my users’ way of interacting with my product as well as to check their needs & expectations & most importantly to see what I’ve studied, researched & done is matching with my users’ expectations or not, I conducted the usability testing.
I have given some hypothetical scenarios to my participants & checked whether they can perform a certain task or not. Here is the list of questions & the test result -
To my surprise, participants successfully completed most of my tasks & I was really satisfied & happy but when I asked them about the behavioral UT questions like -
Based on these questions, my participants started opening up their thoughts to me & told me their thoughts while using the app, some little bit of confusion they had while using it & what’s their version of certain features about my app & such kind of perspectives were a treasure for me because, through behavioral questioning, I unlocked their thought process & made them think, revisit their own thought process without any bias.
🤹 Iterations:-
I did a lot of iterations from onboarding flow to the leaderboard section, all across the application after receiving feedback from my users & mentors & here are changes in some of the most important screens -
💸 Business Opportunities:-
- Subscription-based service where you can buy the subscription as per your needs (3 months/6 months/12 months) & book unlimited coaching & mentorship sessions with as many coaches as you want & on as many topics as you want.
6. ⏳Reflect & Grow:-
- Keep things as specific as possible, It is really important to know who your user is & what problem would you like to solve rather than be everything for everyone.
- Try to ask non-biased & open-ended questions as much as possible if you want to find out proper insights & pain points of your users.
- The design process is iterative & you have to keep going reverse & forward until most of your hypothesis & insights are validated, tested & done.
- Good visual designs emerge through iterations & while designing my UI it was really hard for me to iterate again & again but, when I saw the final results, I was really satisfied with the work & the feedback I’ve gotten.
❤️ Thank you so much, if you are here, I guess you might have read & enjoyed the experience with my case study. If you have any doubts, feedback or even just want to talk more about the case study or topic, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn/Gmail & I’ll make sure that I respond to you as soon as possible.
