SportLink Platform Development

Project Description + Objective For Sports Players:

Create an intuitive, online platform that connects players and allows them to arrange matches, find and book the selected venue, and facilitate the payment of the venue among participants. Fast, convenient, mobile-friendly, highly flexible and customizable, fun, exciting, and easy-to-use. Invites you to learn and play new sports and find new friends in an uncomplicated way.

Project Description + Objective For Sports Centers:

Create and intuitive, online platform to handle clients’ online booking and cancellation of the venues in real-time, automate revenue collection, receive feedback, and monitor the current status of each field/court.

Rationale:

Playing a sport at any time and should be easy, but unfortunately, it is not. Casual players are discouraged by the difficulties in finding friends to play with, finding an available venue, and booking it. The process can be lengthy, cumbersome, and unreliable. SportLink will be an online platform and booking system to help casual players who are looking for a fun and flexible sports experience find each other and book sports venues easily. Tapping into this under-served segment of the market will translate into higher sales for sports centers at no additional cost. SportLink will benefit from this profitable exchange, becoming an ecosystem that will serve sports players, sports centers and advertisers in an integrated, value-adding, and convenient environment for all its participants.

Challenges (Players):

It is hard for casual sports players to find other players to play a spontaneous match. By using the existing applications for finding friends to meet for an activity, they find themselves frustrated by not finding groups to play with at the time they wish to play or near their home. Moreover, the apps do not offer direct booking at the Sports Centers. This creates a very inflexible environment if you only wish to play a sport without committing to joining a sports league or sports team, which generally includes going to several training sessions and matches at inflexible hours/days.

Furthermore, once players are found, the process of finding and booking a field/court at an agreed time is not straightforward because most sports centers do not offer an online booking/cancellation system and do not give details about the availability of their facilities, types of fields, or payment options.

To facilitate the current process, oftentimes a group of friends who want to play a match designs a person to organize it, it means that the person must collect the payment of the field/court by approaching all the players to collect the money (sometimes leading to money missing and difficulties to find enough timely change) and taking full responsibility from possible damages done to the field by leaving her/his credit card. Even if the payment is done in the cashier by all the participants, there is still the issue of manual payment.

Challenges (Sports Centers):

Sports Centers are not able to fill all the available capacity of their fields/court. Thus, they are losing an opportunity to make more revenues at barely any additional cost (i.e. the existing staff, utility expenses, and other costs are already in place regardless of the demand). Furthermore, the majority of sports centers do not have an online booking/cancellation system and thus miss the opportunity to book matches during non-business hours, which is the time some players have available to book a match. Besides, busy users do not find it easy to change or cancel their current reservations, since the process involves calling the sports center and finding staff available at the time of the call. As a result, some people end up simply not showing up at the booked time, representing an opportunity cost for the venues.

My role:

• Product strategy

• Discovery & design sprints

• User research & analysis

• User flow & stories

• Persona creation

• UI design & prototyping

• Usability testing

• UX strategy

• Brand Creation

• Creative Direction

• UI Layout

• Graphic Design

• Presentation Design

• Video and Image Creation

Customer Journey:

In our case the customer was divided into three parts. Players, Sports Centers and Advertisers. In terms of the journey for our 3 types, we wanted to create a flow that began in a centralized platform. No matter what type of customer, you would be able to fulfill your need from the SportLink site.

Research and Discovery

This would be a centralized, low code platform. Something that would have cross-functionality and enough wiggle room to iterate quickly with minimal hours for development. We chose, as a tech stack:

Knack Front End, Players & Venue Owners

Simplybook.me (calendaring, payment for venues)

Google Cloud(because it gives us free credits) - SQL database-stores player profiles through Knack, Serverless Compute is the matching algorithm that produces the games.

Squarespace wrapping skin for Knack

Zapier integrates Knack, Simplybook and other pieces.

Google API - return a list of venues

Facebook API - find players before players sign up

The initial research was based around questions a various Sports Centers in Germany. Rates, average number of games per month, nice to have's, pain points, barriers to entry and what play/venue information is necessary to carry out bookings.​​​​​​​

Prototyping & User flows

MVP