.png)
An app for ardent sport fans
- In India, sports have a huge influence on everyone.
- Whether it is Cricket, Football, Tennis, etc. athletes from sports are highly influential. With that kind of popularity, athletes are able to endorse brands they believe in.
- But often, those endorsements are just one social media post, which begin to fade over time. In case fans want to buy services/products after a certain time, it's hard to find them.
It was important for me to understand why the problem arises before trying to solve it. I focused on why first, then explored deeper. After interviewing five sports fans, I noticed below pattern in their responses.
- Assurance of product quality.
- Emotional connection that comes with being a loyal fan.
- A fan browses popular e-commerce websites like Flipkart, Amazon, Myntra or searches directly on Google.
- Results are not always 100% accurate. Let's look at an example:
- Even though Flipkart has the product(Too Yumm Chips - Virat Kohli Chips Brand) listed on their website, searching with "Virat Kohli Chips" gives a completely different result. We have to search specifically for the Brand Name - "Too Yumm Chips".
I conducted primary user research to understand how users feel about
- sports,
- athletes promoting brands, and
- their experiences using those brands.
Primary Users: Sport Fans
Duration: 30mins
- Cricket is considered the only sport in India because of it's popularity.
- The community of sports like tennis, hockey, badminton is very small.
- The popularity of male athletes is still very high.
- India has very few female sports fans, even in cricket.
- Female merchandise styles are almost nonexistent.
- It's very difficult to explore all the products endorsed by athletes.
- It's difficult sometimes to differentiate between genuine and copy products.
- In India, It's extremely difficult to order merch for international sport events like the Olympics, FIFA, etc. because of very high handling charges.
Based on all the research and interviews, the following are the most important pain points.
In order to gain an understanding of the competitive landscape, I compiled a list of all competitors and examined their apps and websites, comparing their product offerings and browsing experiences.
.jpg)
.jpg)
I noticed some patterns in the expectations of users based on the user interviews. Based on those insights, below is a user journey I created.
When I had a good deal of insight from the research, I started shaping the solution. Creating a user journey helped me figure out the path to reach the goal for the user. Below is the Information Architecture for the Sports Store App. I decided on the name - Sports Store as it will contain every product that is related to sports and athletes.
I took design inspiration from various e-commerce platforms like Flipkart, AJIO, Myntra, etc. to understand their design systems. I began with paper sketches, and later, after finalizing them on paper, I designed low fidelity wireframes in Figma.
After creating wireframes, I then focused on user interface design, as well as how the visual language of the app would support the purpose of creating a user-friendly experience.
Before deciding the color palette, I created a moodboard to get a feel for the design direction.
- I used blue as the primary color as it represents the color of Indian sports.
- I used yellow as a secondary color as it is always associated with gold, medals & trophies.
- There were neutral shades of grey used for disabled states, borders, texts, lines, and backgrounds.
After selecting the colors and typography, I ran the accessibility check on the initial frames to ensure text is readable for users. Below is the result:
Flows covered:
- SignUp/Login Screen
- Home Screen
- Trending Sport Events
- Athlete Store
- Place an order
Now that we have given shape to our solution, I was thinking about the future scope of this project. How can we scale up the project? What features can we add? I have outlined the future scope of the project below:
- More Athletes: Adding athletes from diverse sports.
- E-Sports: The E-Sports industry in India is booming right now, their players also have a large following. I would like their stores to be added to the App.
- Theme Spaces: the trend of renovating homes and offices in sports themes is also growing in India, but the options are few. It would be nice to have such a feature in the app suggesting ideas and helping them in implementation.
