Intramural sports are recreational leagues that allow participants to play the sports they love at multiple competitive levels. These leagues are commonly present on college campuses as students often seek ways to participate in organized sports. One challenge presented by intramural leagues is organizing them. To solve this, many colleges turn to third-party platforms for help. The current competitors offering solutions for collegiate intramural organization are IMLeagues and Fusion Play. Our university—the University of Colorado Boulder—has used both platforms. This allowed us to discuss students' experiences with our two main competitors. Our interviews showed that both these platforms have significant issues regarding their design, functionality, and technical reliability which can be improved upon. With hundreds of thousands of college students competing in intramural sports nationwide, we view these problems as an opportunity to provide a better product that meets the needs of students and universities alike.
Six weeks
I was the lead UX designer and researcher for this project. I completed this project with two other students, Nathan Kochera and Elliana Petersen.
The current intramural sports experience is plagued with technical difficulties such as a lengthy and confusing registration process and poorly designed tools for team management.
To better understand the pain points in the current intramural sports experience, we conducted five interviews with students who had played intramural sports at our university. For each interview, we asked the participant questions such as "What was the process of registering for intramurals?" and "Can you describe the level to which the current intramural sports platform meets your needs?" Through this testing, we identified opportunities for improvement.
By interviewing students with particularly keen insights into the problem, we gained a comprehensive understanding of the shortcomings of existing intramural platforms. With this understanding, we created a mind map to organize our research and frame the problem as we ideated solutions. The mind map allowed us to separate our findings into features participants desired and issues they faced.
To gain a better understanding of how we could improve the digital experience of intramural sports we formulated the following how might we statements:
How might we make it easier to participate in intramural sports?
How might we improve upon the design of current competitors in the market?
How might we make it easier to organize and manage intramural sports leagues?
How might we make paying for intramurals more straightforward?
How might we make the process of managing games easier for intramural referees?
To read our teams comprehensive design brief including our customer personas, interviews, and business strategy please click here.
Intramural participants need an easy way to register for sports, access their schedule, and communicate with their team. Intramural organizers and referees need an easy way to manage staffing, scheduling, and logistics.
For our branding color scheme, we chose to go with our school's official colors. These colors however would be individualized to each university that used our platform allowing for a more customized and user-centric experience.
Since our team was on a limited time budget to complete this project we jumped into creating mid-fidelity wireframes, opting to skip low fidelity hand drawn ones as a means to save time. We created these wireframes to lay out the digital experience and demonstrate what interface elements would exist on the app. Creating these was a critical start to the design process since it allowed us to define and plan important elements.
Transitioning into my high-fidelity prototype, I began designing the desired features while improving upon more detailed design feedback. The implemented layout allows the user to easily register for sports, message their teammates, and see their teams, schedule, and roster.
Please click here to interact with the prototype.
For my expert interview, I met with Kevin Cook, a Senior UX Designer at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Kevin had some insightful advice regarding the prototype for our app. Overall he said that our prototype was in a good place, and besides some minor design changes, it did the job effectively.
The first piece of feedback that I received was to consider implementing a different login system other than the University SSO platform. A login without the University SSO would be much simpler and streamlined if we wanted to expand our product to organizations other than universities. On the hypothetical development side of our product, integrating the SSO platforms of different universities would be a logistical challenge with the heavy backend code required. There are however some pros to this current system, especially if we kept our product university only since the SSO allows for the linkage of student data and a greater overall integration into the university systems.
The second piece of feedback I received was to implement more advanced visual design techniques in the app such as drop shadows and borders around the icons. These elements add some dimension to the visual style of the app and create a more appealing aesthetic. Kevin and I went through some examples of these design details and talked about the specific elements that will affect this style.
This project was a great opportunity to improve my UX design skills and gain experience creating a design from scratch. I learned a lot about Figma through this process as well as creating user personas, conducting interviews, and conducting market research.
