Teamder

An App for connecting individuals with local sports teams and teams with individuals

About the Project

The Task: A course project to design an App or Website to fill a perceived user need. Teams were given maximum freedom to come up with various ideas and develop them from the ground up.

The Team: Andre White (myself), Ivan Fernandez (Project Manager), Chitram Graham (coding, UX/UI design), Mona Wong (UX/UI Design).

My Role:UX and UI design

Timeline: 3 Weeks - February 2022

The App

Teamder (a play on Tinder) is an app for connecting individuals with sports teams and teams with individuals. Designed to make it easier for people to make social connections through local sports, safely and quickly.

Process for Brainstorming ideas for the new app

Research

We started by conducting 9 user interviews based on the ideas of how people get involved with sport and what are the main reasons why they play or become involved in team sports.

Filtering user interview results into an Affinity Diagram.

Resulting User Persona from User Interviews.

Key Insights

“Mid-age professionals play team sport to keep healthy and form social connections.”

“There is no easy way to find out about team culture / dynamics for new teams.”

“Searching for a new team generally involves basic google searching of key terms (sport + local area).”

“Players generally play for teams for an extended period of time, and will occasionally find it difficult to find fill-in players.”

“There are a base set of hygiene factors that are important to our users when they consider joining a sports team - such as Covid Safe, personal safety and health.”

Key Pain Points

Finding teams that match a users exact needs.

Under-standing team culture & dynamics before joining.

Having to travel to far to play team sports.

Too much admin in searching for or contacting potential teams

Joining a team but finding they don't match their needs or values.

So...

We observed that most people who wish to play team sports, want to connect with people of a similar level and interest but don't want to waste time searching for those teams,as this canlead to frustration and disappointment when the team does not meet their needs or values.

So how might we help mid age professionals to quickly connect with sports teams that match their physical and social needs, saving them time and energy and pairing them with the most appropriate team that matchs their most important criteria?

Conceptualisation | Ideation

Applying the insights from our research, we developed our Value Proposition and Feature Prioritization Matrix and worked on three key utilities for our app design to focus on.

Value Prioritization diagram.

Feature Prioritization diagram.

App Key Features

Individual Profiles/Team Profiles

Advanced filtered search: area, time, skill level

Notifications and in App messaging

Paper frames ideation of search features.

Paper frames ideation of team profiles.

We also designed a Style Guide with a play on retro sports themes.

User Testing

Through out the testing stage we did 2 rounds of user testing and then a round of iterations based upon our testing results after each stage. Beginning with low fidelity prototypes to mid fidelity.

What Worked

What Didn't Work

Final Prototype

Team Search flow.

View the full prototype on Figma

Concluding Points

The teams research and user testing revealed that Teamder fills a current gap in the market; although getting along with team members is a key consideration when joining a team, no other app allows users to understand what potential teams / players are like before they join the team.

Whilst Teamder is an app addressing an essential need people have when joining a sports team, to ensure the app's success, we would look to expand the app's set of use cases so that its relevancy extends beyond finding new teams and players.

A number of ways we would achieve this would be to:

Some Key Take-aways...
White Space is underrated
Important to gain inspiration from contempor-ary sources
Always look for ways to incorporate interaction