As a big fan of playing basketball and hockey and growing up wanting master these sports, I remember multiple times searching for and buying new sports equipment to up my game. Even nowadays, after seeing a favorite athlete of mine using a cool sports technology product, I often look up what it is on the internet to see if it is worth buying and if there are any other similar products made by the same company that might be of interest. To aid in this process of discovering new sports technology products and learning more about my favorite athletes, as a side project, I tried designing the end to end mobile experience for a product I wish I had myself and the following case study demonstrates the steps I took towards designing the final product.

I began my discovery process by first thinking about what sort of problems I could solve that would work towards improving my performance in sports. My two favorite hobbies are playing hockey and basketball and I also enjoy watching professional sports. Thinking about how I enjoy reading about athletes and how they train to inform how I work out, I realized how much effort it is to learn about how professional athletes train and that there is no central hub for learning about athletes’ lives with regards to training. I believe there is so much to learn from professional athletes that know how to train properly since researchers are always looking into how athletes can enhance performance and optimize recovery. If only there was a way for us all to learn how to recover better and faster without the need of a professional contract.

Through understanding that the root of the problem is that every day people don’t have access to the worlds’ top knowledge or tools towards become healthier and better at sports, I concluded that it was worth creating a product that could provide insight into how professional athletes train and how everyday people could train like the pros as well. Specific goals that I then came up with that I wanted to achieve with this app would be to allow users to personalize what sports they want to learn more about how to train better, next would be users to follow their specific professionals so that they can train like their favorite athlete. The final step that I wanted to allow users to be able to achieve was to be able to be able to use the app has an end-to-end ecommerce platform where users could shortlist and purchase products directly from the app.

In attempt to prioritize the end user’s point of view, many times I like to lay out all the tasks a user may want to complete in the form of user stories and epics. I use user stories to fully grasp what functionality should be visible to end users by breaking down each task into the smallest form that would provide value to the user. I then use epics, which encompass many user stories, to provide an overview of the features of the product. This phase of putting together user stories and epics is a helpful way for me to evaluate design decisions and create a useful user experience.

Next after evaluating what tasks need to be designed from creating user stories and epics, I like to organize each task into a high-level user task flow. Creating a user task flow helps think through the overall architecture of the product before any features are designed. Furthermore, crafting a user task flow helps think in terms of a user working through the flow of the application, and helps with determining if the conceptual model agrees with the user model.

My next step before diving into designing high-fidelity mockups was to visualize the user task flow. For each step in the user task flow, I quickly sketched some wireframes of what each step could possibly look like which helped with brainstorming how users would interact with each part of the application. This final step before beginning defining the final user interface was helpful in realizing different edge cases that a user may run into as well as helped with thinking about what the user experience should when encountering an error.

At this point, I was ready to iterate the wireframes into a form that would be simple to use and intuitive to potential users. This became a major theme of focusing on making simplicity a top priority because efficiency was a main value proposition since users already can search online for sports products themselves. However, having all information about sports training consolidated into one app would become the differentiator over other available solutions.