SportZone

By conducting survey, contextual inquiry, and interview, we conclude the most common user concerns while finding people to play sport with.

Major insights
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• It's difficult to find people with similar age and skill level to play with.
  
• People have to switch between different apps to host/join an event. They usually use social media to find people.

Design features ideas inspired by contexual inquiries‍

• Search filters for skill level, age, etc...
• Adding and removing people from an event
  
• Event can be set as public/private
  
• Sharing photos after the event
• Enable leaving ratings for positive experience
• Location and number of people will be set

Conceptual Design for User's Mental Model

• Provide maps with directions in our app so that users may quickly discover event destinations.
• Allow users to post images from the game and rate the host.
• Aim to create smooth experience for users to establish filters based on their sport, age, and level.
• Enable invitation to friends or players to their preferred event.
• Provide a sport matching platform for users who want to participate in or host a game.
  

The prototype will cover the whole process of how a user will interact with the App.  First, we made a mood board to collaborate and unify our design style. During the design process, we analyzed and referred to the existing apps on the market which have similar functions. Also, we referred to our sketches and low fidelity wireframes. Our team divided the job up with each team member designing different pages. Then, we combined them and made several changes to make it a proper working medium fidelity wireframe that can be used for usability testing.We made some revisions to the wireframes from analyzing our usability test findings. At last, we ran the pilot test to get feedback from users and revised our design.

Rethink whether making an app is the most viable solution
Research showed more than 50% of U.S. consumers download zero apps per month. Moreover, adding an extra step, such as registering an account, may directly affect the user's interest in using such a product. Finding people to play sports should only require minimal effort to match with others quickly. Therefore, a website link or plugin service that can skip download and register will be more feasible than using an app.

An easy going approach for the users
To make the users choose our design over traditional methods of finding people to play sports with, the solution needs to be more straightforward. Since most people use social media to find people to play with, a social media plugin function, such as a discord bot, a Facebook messenger plugin, etc., will increase the interest of users to create and join sporting events.

Permission or no permission
If a player wants to host a soccer game, it will requires the host to accept 20 requests to play the game. That doesn't sound fun for either the host or the player. We design a platform for users for sport matching. The user's behavior is not something we can control. Therefore, allowing permission only for private matches is the better solution. Otherwise, players could join on a first-come, first-serve matter for public events.
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Inclusive design for all users
Social media is a popular tool for people with disabilities to stay connected. For future steps, adding accessible functions such as maintaining color contrast at 4.5:1 or allowing 200 % enlargement will enable users with visual impairment to use our design.

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