Summary
A gameday iOS application prototype for Elon Phoenix fans. The app is designed to provide fans with information they want quickly and efficiently, with an emphasis on customization.
Project Description and Goals
This project seeks to capitalize on the second-screen trend in order to better inform and engage fans at live sporting events, or watching sporting events on a traditional main screen. It seeks to consolidate certain features that may be spread across several web pages or portions of the Elon Athletics website into one compact and easy to use iOS mobile application. The project focuses on the overall content strategy and marketing of the app, and it will invariably deal with user experience design as well.
Target Audience
The primary audience for the app is younger (16-35) Phoenix fans who tend to be more likely to use their phones will at a sporting event. They are also more likely to seek out the social and deeper statistical features that the app would provide.
The secondary audience is slightly older Phoenix fans who might be more tech-savvy and apt to use an application to follow Elon athletics. In particular, some of the people who make up the “7 AM Tailgate Crew” would fall under this audience. They are slightly older, but very passionate and active on social media.
The tertiary audience is any other Elon, or perhaps even a visiting team, fan who wants more information on the team and what is going on during gameday without having to stumble their way around the mobile website and/or other applications to do so.
As part of the pre-production process, I developed a user and app persona to more clearly quantify both the target audience and personality of the app itself.
Process
The UI design was based partially on researching existing apps in the marketplace to evaluate the positive and negative aspects of their respective interfaces. The most useful apps over the course of that research were: ESPN FC, Fot Mob, ACC Sports, Duke, FSU Gameday, and ACC Championship. Most notably, I studied what sorts of ways these apps utilized customization to enhance the user experience, as I wanted that to be a key component of my project.
I then took those ideas and began some rough sketches, which I eventually developed into medium-low fidelity and detailed mockups– some examples of which can be seen below:
Prototype
I continued to tweak those mockups based on peer and potential user feedback. As I did, the fidelity and detail was increased as well. The detailed mockups were then uploaded to Marvel and linked together through hot-spots to make the final prototype.
The prototype can also be accessed on Marvel.
Microsite
Additionally, I also coded a simple microsite to present the project at the capstone exhibition. It highlights some of the data and thinking behind the creation of the prototype.
