Video Flow to Lockers to Show

Our client, Phenom, tasked my team with creating a flow and prototype for a new video creation feature. As my team worked on the flow, we discovered usability issues with their "tagging gear" feature. We iterated on that feature's design to create a better user experience and moved towards gamifying the tagging gear feature. By adding competition and fun to the tagging gear feature, we believe it will increase the feature's use.

Overview

Phenom is a social media application for young athletes. It aims at giving them a voice and platform to tell their story and showcase “gear they are rocking.” Currently users can only post photo moments.

Click here to view prototype

My Role

On the team I acted as Lead UX Researcher. My primary responsibility was understanding the user and providing design suggestions based on the research. I was responsible for delivering personas and an insights deck.

The main methods used were surveys, comparative analysis and user interviews.

What are the Kids Into These Days?

Phenom has professional and college athletes in their network. However, the app’s main users are high school and middle school athletes.

Initially my team wanted to create an innovative video creation app that would help Phenom stand out from the pack. After surveying their user base, we realized Instagram is the overwhelming favorite application for video creation and general consumption.

if Phenom’s users love using Instagram due to its simplicity we need TO BE INSPIRED BY THEIR DESIGN. OTHERWISE WE LOSE THE OPPORTUNITY OF FAMILIARITY.

What Will Make User Think the Video App is Cool?

My team believed in order for the application to capture the dynamics of sports it needed more than just video creation. Our interview subjects asked for things like music, speed control and a spotlight, all features added in our final product.

“I want to be able to add music to the highlights to make it look cool. Also I play on the line, so a spotlight or some kind of way to show where I am on the field would be good.”

Based on the user who said the above statement, I created a persona for the video creation user.

Will the kids still tag gear if they do not have to?

In the current application one of the final steps to posting photos is tagging gear. Brian gave us screenshots of real user feedback to help with our design. One thing we noticed was many users were not tagging gear because they wanted to, they were tagging gear because they had to.

Brian said they were likely not going to require their users to tag gear in the next iteration of the app. Phenom has goals of becoming the go-to application for advice on sports apparel and the tagging gear is critical to achieving this goal and their brand identity because it encourages users to post about their gear.

Our solution was to make the tagging gear a game. The users are all competitive athletes so we wanted to encourage them to tag gear by stimulating competition.

We built upon the apps current “locker” feature. The locker is where all gear currently lives. In our design users gain titles and can move up for tagging more gear in their locker. For example going from rookie to varsity. They also receive trophies which are displayed publicly for their followers to see.

Who can influence the kids to tag gear?

Influencers are important to any apps brand. We identified influencers as users who have at least 250 followers and are followed by people they do not know.

We believe if the influencers are tagging gear and have the high titles, like All-Star, it will spread the Phenom brand and users will tag more gear. We designed with this hypothesis in mind.

I conducted a second survey to find out if we can identify influencers and see if they are posting regularly about gear. The below are infographics I created about the results.

According to our results, 72% of users who post regularly about their gear are followed by people they do not know. We can infer that the above 27% meet part of our criteria of being influencers. For a young application like Phenom this is great it shows influencers are posting about their gear.

The next question is do users follow people they do not know because they like their taste in gear? Based on our results, the answer is yes as the graph below shows.

Why these results matter to us?

These results show that there is at least a foundation to test our hypothesis about the importance of influencers. More importantly an opportunity to see if idea works. If influencers can use this to grow their brand, it increases the opportunity for branded partnership is therefore more revenue.

Next Steps

• Our client was very pleased the deliverables, they will keep us in the loop as they integrate our ideas and features.

• Testing out our hypothesis about the gamified locker to see if more users would tag their gear.

• We did not get a chance to fully flesh out the trophies that users would receive for tagging gear.

• One limitation to our research is that we did not speak to female users, majority of the application's users are male but female users are more active. It would be interesting to see how that would effect the design.