I, along with my team, was asked to create a platform for mentoring student athletes. Athletes in Action (AIA) is a branch of Cru that works primarily with student athletes and they had three years of material that they wanted to make. We were tasked with the delivery and design of the material. Additionally, the client shared a that major pain point his team experienced was the need to have a way to track a student's progress through the material.
Lead UX Designer, Visual Design, Product Owner
Worked with Project Manager and Stakeholders in addition to my team of five creative professionals.
Since the client was open to various deliverables, I brainstormed different ways to solve this problem. Currently the material was on Google Docs and had been being used in that way. We could create a website, an app, update Google Docs, or various other solutions. Our team didn’t not have a developer but the client has said that they had talked with an app developer. I decided that with the information we had been given, an app would be the best solution. Student athletes are very busy so have having something that is easy to access from anywhere would be ideal.
Before my team started the design process, I wanted to make sure that we were working on the right thing. I had my team research what else existed internally and externally that was similar. This was for two reasons; one to learn from other products and secondly to make sure we weren’t duplicating work.
Our research led us to the Chief Product Officer where we found out about a very similar project that was being worked on. Initially we thought is was the same project but it turned out that someone else in the org, who sat at a desk next to our client was working on something very similar. I set up a meeting with each of them and the CFO. From that, we concluded that the other project was a longer, 2-3 year project that was solving problems across the org while our client was looking for something specific to his need, faster. We decided that the best thing was to deliver our client's project and use that as a way to do additional testing and analytics for the larger project.
With that plan established I began my design approach. As I start every project I like to use design thinking. I begin by asking questions like “what do we not know that we need to know” and “where is our biggest knowledge gap” For this project, I mapped out all of the potential steps along the way. It’s neither exhaustive nor prescriptive but a helpful way to know where to start and what to come back to if I get lost.
I began with determining what kind of research I could do. We would not be able to do traditional user research for this so I started gathering as much information as I could from contacts in the organization. My team was able to interview an AIA staff member to understand that user.
One thing that was made clear in this process was identifying who would be using our app and what their needs were. Even though student athletes (college students) would be viewing it, the early adopters would be AIA staff (1000 stateside) and volunteers. Another thing that we realized is that there would be users that would use this both as a mentor and mentee. For example, an AIA staff is mentoring a student athlete and after a couple of years, that athlete begins mentoring freshman athletes. So they would need to be able to interact with the app in both of those ways.
From what we had gathered, I put together a couple of empathy maps; one for a student athlete and one for a mentor.
1. Student athletes have high value on self improvement and achieving goals but have very busy lives.
2. Currently there is a lack of plan or structure for mentoring journey and there is fear that student athlete are missing valuable learning.
3. Mentors would love to be able to “pass off” a student athlete and have record of where they were at in mentoring journey.
I then led my team in a conversation about the problem we are solving. Collaboration is very important to me so I wanted to do this with my team. I started with this POV statement. Initially our solution was to focus on the content delivery aspect and making something that visually appealed to athletes. I knew that identifying the problem was very important so I asked for feedback from a UX mentor of mine from outside of the org.
His feedback was that our problem statement wasn’t specific enough, we were just restating the project objective. A good problem statement narrows in on a surprising and unique problem that will benefit the user. So I changed the POV statement to focus on the progress tracking aspect that had been coming up and added a HMW statement that reflected that.
I led my team through a few different ideation exercises. We a round of "I Like, I Want, I Wish", "Crazy 8's" and looked at a few mental models.
From this we had a lot of good directions but nothing was sticking out to me for a direction to go. After thinking about different mental models that would be similar to what we were trying to create with the progress tracker, I finally thought of one that seems to fit. I use an app called Libby to listen to audiobooks. I like it because I can select books to put on hold and when they come in, they go on my shelf for reading. If I want to go back and see what books I’ve listened to, I look at my reading history. This felt like a good way to approach the app.
I quickly put together a user flow for how this would look.
At this point in the project, I needed to see what could be built. Since our team does not actually have any devs, we would need to find someone to build it or build it ourselves. I found out that the app developer that was referenced earlier was a website that gave you the ability to build our own app. This would be easy for our team but we would not be able to include the features we wanted. I searched around in order to find a mobile developer that might be able to help us but in the end, everything was outside the budget or simply could not build the app. The client decided to use the original place that he found to build the app and sacrifice some of the features that we had talked about.
At this point in the project, most of the work was passed off to another team member. But for the purpose of this portfolio, and to complete the project I continued to build the prototype.
I did some very lo-fi wireframe sketches from my user flow to get started and then began putting those into high fi wireframes and added visual design.
I designed wireframes in Figma and put togetherfor a couple of user flows. There would still need to be flows for registration, onboarding and other feature and functionalities.
The profile screen is what a user would first see. This user is an upperclassmen student athlete. Next to the name at the top there is a “trophy case” for modules that they have completed. Front and center is the module that they are on and where they are at.
Below that is the lesson that this user will work on next. Then, there are the lessons that this student or his mentor have selected next with a way to add more content. Scrolling down there are the completed lesson so they can go back to review or see what they have already covered.
Back at the top you can swipe to the right and see what module is next and even select content from upcoming modules.
Going back to the left you can see previous modules and review what has been covered.
Moving to groups, this user can see what mentorship groups they are in. This group calls themselves Wednesday Warriors and the user can see the schedule of when they are meeting and what they will cover. They can also see who else is in the group and how to contact them, if those users have entered contact info.
This is how Julian interacts with this as a mentee but he is also now leading a group of freshmen from the wrestling team. Everything else is the same in app experience except in the schedule he is able to adjust and move the topics.
One of the core functions of the app then is to be able to see the group members and instead of just seeing the name and contact info, as a leader, he is able to see what material has been covered whether with him or elsewhere. This gives him the ability to determine what topics he should bring up in their time together. Also, Julian will be graduating soon and someone else will likely begin mentoring these athletes. Their information will be saved so that when they are mentored by someone else, that person will know what topics have been covered.
This is where I left off with this project. The next steps that I would take would obviously work with a developer and find out what the technical requirements would be for a project like this. Before moving into designing more features I would do extensive user testing for these flows with student athletes and AIA staff. My research objectives would be:
1. Do you like the overall design of this app? (NPS score greater than 8/10)
2. What lesson are you (Julian) currently on? (time to complete: less than 6s)
3. How much progress have those that you are mentoring made?(time to complete: less than 25s)
What I enjoyed most about this project was seeing the library concept of “checked out”, “on hold” and “reading history” come to fruition. I also really enjoyed designing the icons and UI elements for this. The biggest challenge that me and my team faced was not being able to actually build what we wanted due to not having an app developer.
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