April - June 2018

Product design

SPRYT was a web app which helps people connect through sport and enables them to find and connect with their nearest training partner, teammate, club or class.

2020 Edit: SPRYT has since then completely changed direction.

After the MVP launch, SPRYT acquired around 10K users, however, in the following year the number of monthly active users had declined rapidly.

The stakeholder's initial asks were to:

Redesign SPRYT's homepage to reflect integration with OpenActive Data by pushing variable content and rewards, on the assumption that it would increase repeat visits.

Create a habit-forming native app, which allows users to quickly and easily: Create events in a few taps, book events and venues locally, connect with other players.

Due to the length of the course, we agreed to prioritise one of the main features - "Create an Event", with a focus on the top sport on the app - 5-a-side football.

I set up interviews and a couple of online surveys with active and potential users to validate the need for an app like SPRYT and understand why they stop using it. We discussed their attitude toward sport; what motivates them to keep active & their sports schedule.

In total: 8 Interviews + 22 Survey responses     

Users indicated that having a native app is the number
one factor to engage with SPRYT on a more regular basis. 

One for active users (contacts provided by stakeholder). The other for potential users – both asking the same questions asked at the interviews.

How is user activity being measured?
On a macro level - by the number of messages being sent & received. To validate this, I messaged all available "active users" on the app and got 0 responses.

Labourious to create events

“The events page is too difficult and time consuming to set up. Need to scroll down 4 lengths of the screen to get to
the bottom.”

Odhran, FOOTBALL player

Olivia, netball player

Ability level is key

“Would love to see if there are other people in the area of a similar ability to
me and interested in playing on
those nights.”

Alistair, FOOTBALL player

To assess SPRYT's strengths & weaknesses in terms of offering and features, I conducted a competitor analysis on direct and indirect competitors.

Starting off with a provided list of competitors, I was able to identify where SPRYT is performing well and where it could improve when it comes to finding players and existing events.

However, it was unclear where SPRYT sits in terms of event organisation features. I further investigated by tested each of the apps “Create Event” features to identify opportunities.

Based on user insight collected so far, I used the jobs-to-be-done framework to split the users into 2 Primary + 3 Secondary types, depending on what they need SPRYT
to do, based on its multiple features.

The secondary user types are Event Seekers, Explorers, PT/Instructors.

Due to the educational nature of the project, I also experimented with all available techniques (affinity, empathy & experience maps, task analysis) to identify themes, organise and synthesize research and truly understand the users' needs.

Instant messaging

Based on the insight collected so far, I creating 3 prototypes, with increasing fidelity and testing each one with interviewees and surveyors.

User testing undoubtedly uncovered some issues and challenges in each iteration. Due to time constraints, I implemented the changes in high fidelity to make sure a
timely delivery.

Learnings: If this product ever got to its development stage and shipped as a native app, I believe that the rest of the existing functionality and features would have needed to be supported by a substantial amount of testing and research to make sure that the new build would bring real value to SPRYTs users.

The high fidelity prototype received lots of positive feedback as well as uncovered areas of future improvement. But here's some of the good stuff to wrap up:

"At this moment in time I feel like it’s something which will benefit a lot of people. I’d use it straight away."
 
- Mickey, football manager

"It’s much better now, well done. It was too long before, you’d have to scroll 3 lengths of the screen."

- Odhran, football player