Case Study: Athlead Connect
The brief:
Athlead Connect is a professional networking site for athletes. Where LinkedIn connects industry professionals, Athlead Connect is a niche community for the sports entertainment ecosystem: coaches, players, recruiters, team managers, and more.
The problems:
Stakeholders want the final product — a browser & app based platform — to appeal specifically to the target audience while maintaining an ease of UX/UI to improve accessibility across audience age-groups and technology-use comfortability. With so many competing networking sites, Athlead Connect needs to be able to purposefully draw its target audience but can’t expect to supplant platforms like Facebook and Instagram entirely from their current role in the industry. Instead, we need to work with the platforms our professionals have already built to create a new utility for the final product.
The Game Plan:
“Athlede wants an end-product that is specific to their audience but realizes that they are competing in a sea of similarly-organized platforms and hopes to work in harmony with — rather than against — the tide. In building this realization into our solution, I can refine the platform's purpose and find opportunity to use the platform’s unique audience to our advantage. I'll run 2 weeks of design sprints based on the design thinking methodology, which includes 5 stages: empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test. I'll eventually design an app that priorities ease of use and elements that will speak directly to the ethos of their unique community. I'll work directly with my client to not only meet the brief, but bring an element of surprise and joy into the final product.”
Initial Impressions & Ideas
- Use baseball cards as a reference point
- Find areas where sports references can stand-in for traditional professional networking elements (ie. “stats” for skills, “seasons” for years)
- Think of Athlead Connect as a uniting space for existing social platforms — all serve their own purpose, but Atlead Connect uses them to create a holistic thumbprint for each user
- Reduce backend settings; users shouldn’t have to go far to make changes
The Process
I began the “Empathize” and “Design” phases by capturing key stakeholder feedback:
“We need our users to spend as little time setting up profiles as possible. The app should be about connecting first and foremost.”
“The sports industry is a little different than other industries — our community is more often organized by team than by company. College affiliations are big, as are connections between players and their management teams.”
“We want this to be a space that fosters intimate, direct conversation which can be hard to come by on the field.”
Next, I knew that we needed to speak to potential users to see where their needs lie. Thankfully, Athlede allowed us access to their contact list of sports professionals. We were able to get responses from 30 users on a spectrum of professions within the industry who gave us open feedback to the questions: “what do traditional networking platforms lack when it comes to your needs and the needs of the sports industry?” and “what do you need from a networking platform to succeed professionally?”