Designing a mobile app to capture game match results

Role

Product Designer

Period

May 2018 - Sept 2019

Activities

User interviews, define workflow,  design screens and user testing.
Worked closely with Humberto (my friend and co-founder of Brackets) to find a way to decrease the lack of match results and statistics in a 75% of incomplete matches and, help sports tournament promoters to update match results as soon as possible after the game ends.

What is Brackets?

Brackets is a web application for sports tournament administrators where they can manage categories, athletes, games, stats, etc.

Brackets provide the mobile app for athletes where they can see their game dates, match results, top teams, athletes and statistics.

The goal of Brackets is to provide a fast, effective and easy way to manage tournaments for promoters and to deliver important information to the athletes.

The challenge

We noticed that in the platform there were games without match results. We weren't accomplishing our goal as a service.

Athletes were sending a ton of messages to the admin asking for match results and the latest stats, because they don’t have the most up to date information in the App

Who is the user?

The administrator is a human between 30 to 50 years old who has a job, the tournament administration is a side project, is their hobby.

The administrator has played sports since a kid, enjoys to lead the tournament and loves to hang out with the athletes/community, all for the love of the sport.

Sports administrator manages an average of 8 categories in the tournament.

My role

I worked closely with Humberto, who is my friend and co-founder of Brackets. Humberto is in charge of the development of the applications and is the salesperson at the same time.

My role was to identify the problem by running interviews to the user, design a solution with Humberto who has a way better perspective of the technology constraints, define the workflow of the application, design screens and create a prototype of the solution to test with users.

Process and Solution

User research to understand and identify the problem

To identify the cause of why there were games without results and stats, we decided to do user interviews with three different sport tournaments administrators. This allowed us to identify the key “problem” of the current version of Brackets.

Administrators were using the Brackets in the right way, there wasn’t any problem of how to use the platform. By analyzing the interviews we identify that the administrators couldn’t capture the results after a game match, because the platform doesn’t perform well in mobile devices, also, during the upcoming week, they were short on time to capture the results because of their job.

The administrators needed full attention on a desktop computer to capture the results for an average of 8 categories in the tournament.

I mapped the experience on a journey map to have better visibility of how the administrator interacts with the platform and to identify their different pain points through the process of capture results.

Journey map of what the Admin user experience by uploading results.

Solution

To solve the problem, we decided to make a mobile app for the tournament administrator.

We did this because we were looking to have a significant impact solution with the minimum development effort, we could reuse some of the athlete mobile screens for this application and, by doing this, the administrator could capture the results in the free time between match results.

Storyboard showing how the Admin will use the Admin App after a game ends.

Application goals

  • Capture the results and stats in real time, but we didn’t have the time, and it was a lot of effort to implement this (not today admins, soon…).
  • A new responsive screen and with fewer options. This was a straight forward solution, but it didn’t feel the right solution.
  • An Admin app where the administrator can only upload the results of their categories.

Application screens

When I was designing the screen, I focused on how the user will capture match results, my goal for the design was to have a “form” that could be filled in an easy and fast way and should be close enough to the document that the auxiliary referee fills during the match.
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The admin user would be able to tap on the athlete, then the form will be displayed inside of a modal, the administrator could navigate through the different fields by tapping the Next/Previous action “keys” of the OS keyboard. By doing this, capturing game results and stats should be easy and fast enough to have the results in less than five minutes.

Explorations I did with Humberto, looking for the best interaction we can use to capture results.

Main screens of the application.

Outcomes and lessons learned

We had a couple of “problems” to publish the app in the store due a miss-understood with the apple store guidelines, we thought that we  were going to change the scope of the app.

Finally, after some conversations with Apple, we were able to publish the application to the App store and test with one tournament administrator.

Also, we learned that the document that the admin use for the stats varies depending on the league and sport, so we need a way to allow the admin to order the stats in the same order of the document so they can capture the stats faster.