DVLP Basketball

My role

  • UI/UX Designer

My team

  • 4 UX Designer

  • 1 Founder

  • 2 Developers

  • Myself (UX Designer + UI Design Lead)

Key contribution

  • Research

  • UI Design

  • Wireframing and prototyping.

  • Developer handoff

Getting started

The Problem

DVLP coaches, including Coach Chevy herself, are motivated to provide the best support to their students, but they struggle to deliver their content to new athletes and organize messages, calendars, and payments. There are currently some apps targeted toward helping athletic coaches with these pain points but they are all prohibitively expensive.

First look at DVDP Basketball

Stakeholder interview

Chevelle Saunsoci, DVLP founder

DVLP basketball was founded by Coach Chevy in 2018. She has played and coached at the D1 level and is using her experience to help young athletes who have the goal of playing at a higher level.

At the time our team met Chevy, she was working with a select list of clients that she had built through her platform. Seeing her client's success inspired her to start building a mobile app so that she could help her clients manage and organize their training and activities better. 

Goals

  • Develop a mobile app that provides service to basketball coaches and allows them to organize all their activities in one place.

  • Create a centralized schedule and payment management that distributes quality educational content to athletes.

Understanding the space

Competitive analysis

We wanted to gain a better understanding of the market and make sure we created a design that was consistent with the industry. We conducted competitive research to understand the market trends on sports coaching mobile apps.

We researched seven competitors like CoachUp, CoachNow, Hoopsmind, Proskills basketball, takelessons.com, Future, Everfit, and baseballfactory.com.

We also noticed that Instagram is the most popular tool for basketball coaches to promote their services, so we looked at the profiles of the 5 most followed basketball coaches/influencers.

Insight 01

Many coach profiles include bio, credentials or verification, reviews, pricing

Insight 02

Many apps have a blog, videos, and upcoming events listed

Insight 03

Most coaches include brands they work with and accomplishments in their bio

Insight 04

Videos and reels are the most shared content

Getting to know the users

User Interview

We conducted 4 user interviews to understanding the experiences of sports trainers as they look to build a client base and share their training content.

Key research insights

We found out that they mainly communicate through text messages, but use other messaging apps to share video content.

They prefer digital payment and direct communication with players. They often find clients through existing networks.

They are seeking an all-in-one digital solution to manage their business, monetize their services, communicate with athletes and their parents, and help the athletes develop their skills.

Persona

Based on the insight provided by the participants during the user interviews, we created 2 task based personas.

Communication trainer: Need to easily communicate with individuals and groups about team updates, feedback, suggested training, etc.

Shop trainer: Need an easy way to make money from training services and gear.

How would it work?

Journey map

We then constructed a user journey map in order to get a high level understanding of the steps that users take to accomplish their goal. One of the processes that we analyzed was the communication with the players. Having this context helped us understand where the DVLP app could potentially help the user. 

Bringing it all together

Design and prototype

With our goals, features and processes mapped we moved into the next phase of actually building the app starting with some rough sketches. We used those sketches to create prototypes and conduct usability tests with users to see what could be improved.

Usability testing

Testing the solution

Issue 1 - Navigation bar:

  • The light bulb icon which was used to indicate the trainer page was confusing for most users. They were not sure where it would take them.

  • Most users expressed the need to have a profile section on the nav bar as it felt more natural and intuitive.

  • They found it unusual to have a hamburger menu on the navigation bag

  • Users were having trouble finding the location of E-courses (currently only available through the shop).

We conducted 4 usability tests on our Prototype and asked users to complete two tasks:

  1. Check your messages and respond to the most recent message you received.

  2. Delete a course and then add a new course.

Solution:

  • Since the users were confused by the lightbulb icon, so we chose to eliminate it and included the trainer page in the hamburger menu.

  • We added a profile tab and search on the navigation bar for easier access.

  • We moved the hamburger menu to the profile page as users found it unusual to have it on the navigation bar

  • Lastly, we eliminated the shop tab on the navigation bar and included my shop and e-courses in the hamburger menu.

Before

After

Issue 2:

Users requested an easy way to write a new message once on the chat page

Solution

We added a button on the chat page to write a new message.

Before

After

Issue 3:

Users requested an easy way to add their appointment with their students to their calendar.

Solution

We created a shortcut so that if a date or time was written in a text message it could become a calendar event.

Before

After

Final thoughts

After our presentation, Chevy, the founder was ecstatic and absolutely loved the new app we had designed in just 3 weeks. 

She decided to add our mockups to her landing page and took the prototype to be developed. As a result, we also prepared all the hand-off materials and answered any questions developers had about the design or functionality of the app.​​​​​​​