Tomer Bar-Sade
UX designer
Recharacterization for an app
that has undergone a product change.
Playform is a start-up that developed into a mobile application for soccer training for youth players. The start-up knows how to take professional and advanced training technology and integrate them into any smartphone.
The unique technology is based on Computer Vision AI that knows how to measure the exerciser's performance using the phone's camera.
We met the app at a stage where the company decided to update the product structure and its business model. As part of the process, they want to carry out a new characterization and design to the product.
The existing product structure
​
As of now, the app has a collection of exercises categorized by types of training - the child records himself performing an exercise through the app. At the end of the exercise, he receives various data measured by his performance. The child also has the option of facing different challenges and competitions around the same exercise(s).
The future change in the product structure:
​
The structure of the product will be divided into leagues according to the level of the trainees. The progress in the leagues will be based upon the trainee's performance (successful completion of training programs)
​
The change in the business model:
​
-
Free subscription - slow progress in leagues and exercises without needing to purchase a training program - instead have the option to purchase a single training program or a bundle of them.
-
Premium subscription at a monthly cost - all training programs are open for use at all times - progress in the leagues will occur faster through a premium subscription.
What doesn't change?
​
The app includes an area of ​​competitions and challenges that are based on training exercises. The general structure of the competition area does not change.
​
Taking off
We took off as three: Adam Gilboa, Ortal Shaolov and myself
The major goals defined by the client were:
-
Increasing retention.
-
Increasing paying subscribers.
The main problem that needs to be solved in order to meet the goals:
The children use and the parents pay.
Obstacles
With the understanding that cracking the concept is based on the joint use of parents and children in the app, we broke down the main problem into several challenges that needed to be addressed.
-
The parents pay.
-
There are children without a phone who use their parents' phone.
-
Information security in the app - data storage and children's photographs.
-
Authorization: Is the content at a high level? Will it have an improving effect on the child?
-
Training motivation of the child.
-
The parent wanting to control how the child uses the app.
Audience
After we understood the main problem standing before us and what obstacles must be solved in order to move forward - we moved to the next step and set out to check who the target audience of the app is.
According to the client's brief, the product addresses two global markets characterized by a very large difference between them: the Global market and the American market.
Most children in the global market play soccer in the neighborhood and on the street - this is part of the global soccer culture, and of course most of them are also active in clubs and organized soccer teams for children and youth.
Whereas in the American market, there are almost no soccer games occurring in neighborhoods and on the streets. The American street is reserved for traditional American sports such as baseball and basketball.
Soccer in the U.S is most common in schools and organized soccer teams and institutions. Soccer is the first team sport that kids meet in an organized way such as in elementary school, and only at more advanced stages do they integrate into the other sports
.
Another element that distinguishes the American market from the global market is the involvement of parents. Sport parents is a well-known and a common term in the American sports culture. It describes parents who are intensively involved in the sports life of their child, like in various sports teams. In the American soccer world, SOCCER MOM is a popular term used to describe mothers who are actively involved in their children’s sports activities, specifically soccer.
The client also added that in the first stage, they are planning to target the American market. Knowing that, we realized that the main effort to understand the target audience should be concentrated on two main personas:
-
Involved parents in the American market - Soccer Parents
-
Children playing in organized soccer teams
Personas
In the first step, we wanted to know if the target audience and the personas that the app currently addresses are accurate enough or if adjustments should be made to the new changes in the product.
The client had 4 personas according to which the app was designed for and the marketing system was built upon:
1. Rafael – A talented boy who doesn’t play in a formal team
2. Monique – Very motivated girl who plays in a formal team
3. Isabel, Monique's mom – A soccer mom. Very dedicated sport parent
4. Coach Martin – A young and motivated soccer coach
​
At first glance, we realized that the coach's personas are not relevant to us. The coach does not use this app, but rather a complementary product to the app that the company is not currently focusing on developing - that's why we took it out of the equation and deleted it from the list.
User research
We are left with 2 different child personas and an additional persona of a mixed parent. From understanding the motivations and desires of those personas, we embarked on user research that was based mainly on various studies and browsing relevant forums and groups on the net.
We formulated several insights as a result of the user research:
​
What motivates
the target audience:
Parents
-
Feeling proud
-
Feeling successful following the child's success
-
Fulfilling their dreams through the child
-
Socially strengthening the child through sports
-
Feeling that the child is following the parent’s path (for parents with a past in sports)
Kids
-
Feeling pleasure
-
Gaining positive experience
-
Improvement of skills
-
Belonging to a group
-
Feelings of success
-
Gaining recognition
-
Improving fitness
-
Feeling excitement
​
​
What children who play
in organized sports are afraid of:
(Jim Taylor, Ph.D., specializes in the psychology of sport and parenting)
​
-
Disappointing my parents (and, by extension, my parents won’t love me)
-
Being rejected by my peers
-
Ending my sports dreams
-
It will all have been a waste of time
-
Failure in sports means I’m a failure
​
​
Other apps same problem
​
The second phase of the research focused on looking for products that have successfully found solutions to the challenges we face around the relationship between the parent, the child and the app.
Analysis of the existing design in the product
With the insights gathered from the user research, we set out to analyze the existing characterization and design in the app.
The app was launched in the MVP stage with a very basic and a not so professional design. Since it went on the market, no design changes have been made to it.
The main problems that stood out
to us while going through the pages:
​
-
Navigation is cumbersome and uninviting.
​
-
The character of the coach - looks completely generic and inhuman and the idea is confusing. In addition, we received feedback from players in an organized soccer team saying that as soon as they started using the app for organized training in the team, they thought the coach in the team had changed without them knowing about it.
​
-
Exercises: divided into 6 categories, each with many exercises lacking the ability to sort or customize.
​
-
The player card with the data on a separate page - consider an easier and simpler data display that does not require switching between pages.
​
-
There is no reference to parents' participation in the app whatsoever.
Cracking of the concept
If we summarize the
first steps in the process:
1
We have a central problem that we need to solve
by referring to several challenges in the process.
​
2
We have existing personas from the client.
​
3
From the performance of the user research,
we began to understand the problems in the
relationship between parents, children and the app.
​
4
We found that there are different
solutions in other products.
​
5
We have an existing design as a starting
point for a new characterization.
​
We gathered all of these ingredients and
began sketching and testing different solutions.
Sketch
We knew already from the ONBOARDING stage that we wanted a parent interface. If there's a chance to harness them for joint use along with the child, it will be made immediately after downloading the app to the phone.
At first, we thought of producing two ONBOARDING tracks: one for the child and one for the parent:
%20copy.jpg)
During testing and sketching, we realized that not all parents who will use the app are considered “SPORT PARENTS” and not all of them will become super involved. Most of them will not want to enter a separate onboarding process in the application, and some parents do not even know that the child has downloaded the app.
Ok, so we understand that we don't have a broad enough picture about parents using the app.
But who are those uninvolved parents?
What motivates them? And what will prevent them from giving the child access to the app and a paid subscription?
If we do not know all these answers, we will risk "losing" those parents as potential "paying customers", thus preventing a potential relationship with them.
The obvious conclusion at this stage was to first of all, build a new persona of an uninvolved parent:
An integrated solution for involved parents and non-involved parents
After we built the fourth persona, we went back to the work desk and started sketching a new solution that also takes into account "non-involved" parents.
Instead of two onboarding tracks like in the initial idea, in our new solution, we want to create a separation between child use and parent use.
​
The use of the app is for the child only. The way that the parent gets involved is through a connection between the app and the parent's phone number. The parent receives mobile notifications, and can control the permissions he allows the child in the app. The child can send a request to the parents to unlock locked privileges or to purchase training programs, all through the app.
​
This way, the experience of using the app itself is reserved for the child, but the parent has the ability to control the things that are important to him. An involved parent can get all the information he wants directly to this phone. A parent who is not interested in that can disable notifications and give the child free use, knowing that he can still see all data and carry out supervision when it suits him.
The child onboarding
The parent /sponser area
The app main areas
