Flex is a sports app where athletes can improve their overall skills, network with other athletes, and show off your game by earning reps to play a sporting event.
The challenge in creating Flex is to make this a dynamic, useful app for athletes to stay motivated and continue to get better every day. By having intrinsic motivation to improve their skills through their retrospective sport, this will help incentivize athletes to earn reps when they play events and be competitive.
To bring Flex to light, it's important to ask the right questions towards who you're building this up for. When it comes to finding goals towards solutions, a great way to start is to find your audience and user base.
Flex would be perfect for athletes. Athletes can choose their sport they would prioritize rather it be basketball or soccer.
Nothing beats competition in trying to show off your hard work. Stats and placements would be a excellent feature to build.
When it comes to training or playing with your team, constant communication is vital to any form of success that will help later in life.
To bring Flex to light, it's important to ask the right questions towards your user base and who you're building this up for. I decided to interview at least 2 people who were involved in sports to gather important insight on what they would like to see and the importance to relate to their stories to start a product.
After gathering insights and data from what kinds of features should be added to Flex from a small audience targeted by athletes, I ran down a couple of stats worth being mindful of and validate down the road.
A overwhelmingly, heavy favorite to add to Flex is finding answers through hashtags. From experts to beginners, there will be a need to filter and specifically find athletes and forums.
Experienced players have more of a say than athletes who are starting from the ground up. This would highly depend on their ranking through the leaderboard and rep earnings by playing events.
Looking at stats is a monumental follow from all forms of sports. This will help athletes stay engaged and informed on what can be improved and what you accomplished.
After playing an event, athletes can review a players performance based on how well they performed. Honest feedback is key based on their average reviews and rankings.
After asking the right questions, evaluating the empathy map, and looking at key insights, it's time to put everything all together and look into what needs to be prioritized over other features for Flex.
Basketball has been a great getaway when i'm not working as an engineer. Often times, it's hard to find players that are super skilled and specifically catered to my experience. It's hard to compete when you don't have that synergy and one basketball to hold.
I would like to find talent that I know can get the job done and know what it takes. I don't want to mess around and get frustrated by a bad shot or someone who doesn't know how to play the game of basketball.
I need an app that can hold my accountable and stay motivated to get better. Some days are good and some days are bad. I struggle maintaining ways to have a daily routine and maintain consistency while trying to perfect my skills.
All I ask is that if I want to get better at playing basketball, there will be a way to make mistakes on the fly. If I join random events on the court, I hope teammates can wholeheartedly accept me to be on the team, compete, and have fun!
Competitive Analysis gives incentive to focus on the pros and cons for each competitor and bring everything together into Flex.
The approach in finding the style I wanted Flex to associate with involved a lots of tinkering on bright colors. I enjoyed the mood and feel between medium purple, pink, and coral for Flex because it creates a atmosphere to for all tiers of athletes; it's easygoing and welcoming for beginners but also a mentality of a workhorse for advanced athletes too who rise up early in the morning and do work!
For new users, you can create an account and entering information like weight and height for example. For existing users, you'll know what to expect for Flex and go straight to the home page.
Choose your selection for position rather it be Point Guard to Center.
See what your main strength is to contribute to a team.
Choose your number that you want to associate and identify with.
Want to change moves from the skills you're practicing in the training section for Flex? Now you can with a click on the top and choosing a move you feel like you need to prioritize.
You can then see what moves you've done with a check mark, see level of difficulty between easy and medium, and current skill you're practicing on.
You can go in depth with your current stats you're seeing. Everything is correlated with the color key between missed shots, post shots you made, and combined others. The dashed, silver line is essentially whether you're meeting expectations versus your competitor.
Compare your stats versus your competitor between your percentages and efficiency rating.
See how many reps you have accumulated versus your competitor and continue to find the movtivation to stay on top.
In the forum section, you can immediately see ways to find a way to join a team through hashtags like Roster and see if there are any open spots as well as Critique to see what kinds of feedback athletes are getting when looking at their reviews.
As you can see when you click on the forum section, you can immediately see the average star reviews they have and the tier they are in whether they are a beginner or expert.
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Here, a filter option appears and you can search specific athletes that cater to your liking.
Here is the look of the player card profile. You can see his bio, reviews, stats, current teams he's on, and if interested, message the athlete.
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Messages are only specific to invites only and does not apply to random events. If accepted, the athlete will get info on where the event will take place and get twice the reps than random events.
Let's say you log back in to the Flex app. Immediately you're presented on one of the first screens introduced on the Home Section. When you click onto the home section, you will go straight to the events section where you can immediately join in, introduce yourself, and contribute when the ball tips.
This will increase the chance of mistakes being made because of the lack of chemistry and not earning as many reps as opposed to event invites.
Unlike getting invites from a specific invite, here is a event where you can join without any hesitation.
Event Invites are exclusive to message only acceptances.
Get in there and make an immediate contribution or if you want to back out last minute, find other events nearby.
Reps are being earned live as you play the event (like taking a jump shot or layup).
Once the event is done, you'll get to see the amount of reps you'v earned. For example, I made 10 jump shots which gave me 10 rep points.
For the profile page, you can see your bio, accomplishments, and messages. The captain will message everyone on the team to review the performance of the team.
Once you submit the review, reps are unlocked and now your ranking will be improved. The better the grade, the faster your progression levels up. The worse the grade, the faster your level of progression falls down.
The final page unlocks the reps once you submit your review to the captain of the team.
Building a brand new product is not an easy task. It's imperative that the overall product meets business demand that is sustainable over a period of time. From time to time, some bugs will be released at the initial launch, but it's how you respond to those struggles that will ultimately define the overall legacy for the brand. It's not any more or less different with Flex, which is why it's not common to get feedback from usability testing and iterate. There's nothing wrong with this as long as transparency is involved and also have a winning mindset.
"If I was a new user, I would like a brief synopsis or introduction of how reps work and balance Flex. I really like what it has to offer, but for a new user, this can be easily introduced if the app will be backed and fully developed."
"There was some initial confusion regarding viewing stats on the training section. It would have been nice if there was some context instead of just straight numbers. I personally understood it, but if this was someone who is older, they wouldn't make sense if this is the final version. For example, "you were 50% better than last week and show specific insights that got you better"".
