Welcome to Courtship!
Summary: Courtship. The tennis social media app. This app is designed to help users find a tennis court to play at and find the perfect partner catered to their skill level.
Roles and responsibilities: UX Research and UX/UI Design
Problem: The problem that needed solving was to help tennis players find an ideal court for them to play at. What appeared during the research phase was players usually didn’t have anybody to play with.
Audience: Catered to Tennis players aged 18+ that did not have a regular court or hitting buddy.
Solution: This was solved by creating the world’s first tennis social media app. Allowing players to not only find their perfect court, but also their perfect tennis buddy.
“I love tennis, but I don’t have a regular hitting buddy”
-Megan Garcia
What I gathered from my survey and my user interviews was people who play tennis don’t usually have a buddy to play with. I thought, what is the point of finding the perfect tennis court if you have nobody to play with? This drove me to add in a sociability aspect.
User pain points:
Not being able to find a good court
Not being able to navigate the app well
Not finding a tennis buddy
Competitive analysis: This shows that the major apps out there only focus on one aspect, Finding a court, or finding a buddy, not both. This led me to create a fusion of the two to give users a more streamlined experience
Persona:
Based on the previous data, I would like to introduce you to James. James is a fairly seasoned tennis player with nobody to play with. James has a real “use it or lose it” mentality and wants to play not only for fun, but for competitiveness, and to hone his tennis skills. However, he can only accomplish this if he has people at his level or above to play with.
User Flows: Then began my user flows. This details the process of starting in the app to find a court to play that matches the users criteria. This will allow users to freely flow through the app with minimal effort
User story: This user story was the most important to meet my clients criteria.
User wants to find a tennis court nearby to play
User opens the app
User can sign up or view courts as a guest
Browse nearby courts
View court details
Select a court to play
Wireframe Sketch: This is my earliest sketch of how I wanted the home page to look like. This early iteration did not include the social tab down at the bottom and was later fine tuned to be more palatable. This early sketch also made the entire home page a map, which was later shortened to make room for court details at the bottom.
Digital Wireframes: These are the wireframes I ended up creating for the app. This time keeping in my the social tab at the bottom as well as some other layout options for the home page. This helped me get a really good idea of how I wanted the app to look and feel going forward.
Usability tests:
100% of users were able to complete their tasks. App was easy enough to navigate that nobody got confused. Tasks that were tested included, starting a profile, viewing a specific court, finding another user and sending a message.
Next steps: Next steps will be adding more features such as, invite a friend and court sharing. Further adding color and better functionality to the app. I will also start to work on brand development to solidify the overall feel of the app.
Final thoughts: Overall I really enjoyed making this app. From conception to implementation it was a lot of fun. This says a lot, because if I am being completely honest, I am not a huge sports fan at all. That being said I think this allowed me to have an extremely unbiased opinion on how the app should look and behave when in development.