Background:

Sportify was in the perfect place to create a research process that allowed the company to understand and empathize with users, stakeholders had just an idea in their heads, but no user research had been conducted. There was no clarity on who the day-to-day users were, what their lives were like, and any goals or pain points they had.

Please keep in your mind that I can’t share all information here due to business privacy!

Business goal:

Develop an application which presents all the information related to the game industry on a scalable basis.

What did I do:

I had several meetings with stakeholders to form a collaborative research plan in Google Docs for this initiative to ensure everyone was on the same page and had the opportunity to get certain questions answered.

(Each session was 60-90 minutes, depending on the client’s schedule, in which they shared their screen while talking about the usage and pain points. Designer, stakeholders, and developers must view at least two generative research sessions monthly. All sessions were recorded with participants' permission, notes were taken by colleagues, and audio files were transcribed.)

Since this was generative research, all of the interviews were very open-ended and more of a conversation. I started with understanding roles and a typical day in the life, how they used Sportify's competitors, and then asked them to walk me through how they typically used those platforms.

1. Benchmark other competitors:

I decided to use competitive research because it will help to recognize how anyone can enhance their business strategy. I traced some common significant features and also read through many google reviews to realize the most common issues.

2.Notes and Affinity diagram:

I took these notes from interviews and created the Affinity diagram based on them. it helped us to understand issues and possible improvement that they faced through other competitions.

3. Construct the Foundation:

Due to time and resource constraints, I used the close card sorting method internally with our team members. users had bad experience with other competitors because of their information architecture so I made a better version of Information Architecture based on the result of this card sorting. IA also helped developers to understand how the users navigate and behave through the application.

Check out the image's detail here.

Check out the image's detail here.

4. Visual result:

After completing research, I created a paper sketch with our product designer; To ensure that developers and stakeholders get a clear understanding of the functionalities and designs that the software needs.

Mahdi Karimi and I designed final UI based on research result

What did we do for future?

1. Establish a continuous testing process for each part within a month to check usability's status and fix problems while programmers are working on other sections.

2. Create a community for our target groups to provide feedback.