PROJECT BRIEF
Attending college is a new, exciting, but also intimidating experience for many young people. One of the biggest questions is the uncertainty of how to make new friends. Many students also enjoy partaking in friendly sports but do not belong to a collegiate sports team. Creating a secure social media platform to find campus pickup games is an effective way to cultivate lasting connections in college.
PROJECT GOALS
USER RESEARCH
When a group of 30 college students, of varying ages and gender, were asked the same questions, survey results showed an overall positive response in the favor of an app used for pickup games at a university.
73% of students surveyed enjoy playing pickup games.
80% of students surveyed say pick-up games they are interested in are not easy to find.
83% of students surveyed feel awkward approaching strangers to start a game.
66% of students surveyed find it difficult to meet people who enjoy the same activities.
USER PERSONAS
NAME: MAYA
AGE: 23, GRAD STUDENT
Maya played basketball on a collegiate level all 4 years of her undergrad. Now that she is ineligible to play as a graduate student she still wants to stay active and be able to play the sports she loves.
NAME: KENZIE
AGE: 18, FRESHMAN
Kenzie is looking to meet new people and new friends outside of her major. She is having trouble meeting people with similar interests. Kenzie loves to get up and get active and would like to meet others that share that interest.
NAME: CHRISTOPHER
AGE: 21, SENIOR
Christopher is in his senior year of college working on his capstone project. He always wished he was able to play a sport but the practice times never worked with his busy schedule. He wanted flexible opportunities to get out and play sports.
USER FLOW
After better understanding the student's needs and what is important to them when finding pickup games, I did research on various social media apps to find how people interact with each other to begin with. I discovered that it is important to keep the interactions over the app as straight forward as possible and focused on the pickup games themselves to promote in person genuine connections and friendships.
SKETCHES & WIREFRAMES
While building the wireframes I referred back to my user flow and user personas to understand the interest and how to meet the needs of multiple types of users.
FINAL COMPS
The core features of the final comps includes the safety of signing in using in a University ID. The feature to sort pickup games by sport, location and time. And the ability to make lasting connections through the platform.
