A one-stop-shop for UC Davis Athletics with everything from upcoming games, featured articles, and exclusive redeemable prizes and giveaways.
I managed design milestones; delegated team tasks; and led meetings between designers, developers, and our client, UC Davis Athletics.
I conducted user research and usability testing to design user flows for reward redemption, profile check-ins, and user onboarding. I assisted in designing core components in the calendar and home flows.
Despite having a large and diverse athletics department, the majority of students don't engage in UC Davis sporting events, leading to low game attendance and decreased funds for the athletics department. Those who do attend, however, have to stay up to date with games via the UC Davis Athletics website, which is inconvenient method compared to opening an app.
Gamify the sporting experience by converting game attendance to rewards
By creating a one-stop-shop for UC Davis Athletics, students can get involved with on-campus athletics and stay engaged by getting rewards for attending games.
Keep up with the sporting scene with featured articles
Complete challenges and get points for rewards
We began our project with surveys and user interviews to pinpoint why students were disengaged with UC Davis Athletics to find a way to tackle their frustrations alongside the department's goal of enhancing engagement.
We received 30+ responses from undergraduate students and found that:
70% of respondents go to games to hang out with friends and for free gear.
Students don't attend games due to the lack of information and advertisement for less popular sports, like swim and lacrosse.
Most students would not be influenced to go to games if they saw others’ majors, years, and housing.
Students are interested in the food options & costs of games in addition to general information like location, date, and opponents.
Our surveys validated the low engagement trends the UC Davis Athletic Department saw at sporting events. Thus, it also reconfirms our solution of gamifying the sporting experience as prizes and giveaways were the most common incentive for students to attend sporting events.
To further evaluate our plans of gamification, we conducted competitive analysis to better understand the current product market, the pros and cons of each, and how they can be improved.
We looked into university sporting apps, rewards apps, and researched effects of rewards on motivation. Here is what we found:
We also looked into the science behind motivation and rewards. We looked into scientific articles written by Cornell researchers Kaitlin Woolley and Ayelet Fishbach an Harvard Business Review to better understand how to make the most effective use of rewards to draw in users.
With our research and our project scope, we worked with our developers and Davis Athletics to figure out the core features and screens we needed to design.
With this user flow in mind, we began sketching wireframes to ideate on potential layouts for these main screens. Together with the developers, we voted on the screens that worked the best and started designing our lo-fidelity screens from there.
After voting on the design solution, we began prototyping the lo-fidelity wireframes. We wanted to get the basic layouts digitalized and green-lit by the rest of the team before incorporating UC Davis Athletics' deign system and solidifying ideas.
While we did settle on a few layouts from our sketches, we also made several versions of the lo-fi screens to conduct A/B testing with our developers and clients.
We designed 3 iterations of our home screen, playing around with element sizing and arrangements. Our client preferred Versions 1 and 2, noting that the featured header article and upcoming events carousel efficiently informs and excites students about games.
We were deciding between an elevated or flat modular card design for our calendar of game information. While the elevated cards were more modern and indicates clickability, we ultimately went with the flat design for its simplicity and readability.
We had two designs in mind for displaying each reward: a modular card or a tiered list. Again, to simplify development for our engineers and to better organize the information, we went with the tiered list.
At this stage, we reached out to Davis Athletics for the UC Davis branding identity. We wanted to start incorporating color and components into our designs to have a functioning prototype ready for user testing. The branded components also helped better visualize our vision, allowing for concrete A/B testing from the developer team and Davis Athletics.
We utilized UC Davis' branding identity for our design as the application was tailored for the Athletics Department to help them increase student engagement. This allows the app to blend seamlessly into the already-existing apps Davis has made, ensuring credibility and consistency. The blues and golds are reminiscent to the Aggie spirit and represents the boldness of the Davis Athletics teams.
With our wireframes established, we went on to design the mid-fidelity frames. We aimed to keep things simple yet dynamic: we wanted to move away from the blocky feel of our screens and add in more motion to mimic the excitement of sporting events.
We landed on our finalized mid-fi screens after first passing the designs through the developers and our client first before sending out the designs for a small-scale user testing session with 2 UC Davis students.
We reiterated our mid-fi designs based on our usability test results from our mid-fi designs as well as our own critiques. We focused on cleaning up our previous designs by incorporating a grid for flush alignments and redesigning various components to be more accessible visually. Following our previous goal of dynamic motion, we added in tab-like designs to break the grid and imitate graphics found in sports coverage.
We tested these hi-fidelity designs in another usability testing session, this time with 8 undergraduate students with various involvement levels with UC Davis Athletics. Our goal was evaluate users' ability to navigate through the app and complete tasks, such as redeeming a prize or finding what game was on the 11th. We then conducted some A/B tests to narrow down component designs.
From these tests we found that:
We further refined our hi-fidelity prototype with these insights in mind, making sure to continue simplifying designs to decrease cognitive load. We then did a final pass to the developers and Davis Athletics for one last round of critiques and A/B testing. During this feedback session, we clarified prototyping concerns, discussed possible missing flows, and advocated for user-centric designs. We brought up various design decisions that opposed the client's desired features, but were supported by user research and user actions in usability testing sessions. With these final comments, we were able to finalize our designs and prepare for our pitch.
Aggie Athletic Rewards encourages students to get involved and engaged with Athletics on-campus as a central information hub for all Davis Athletics.
Projects without leads move very slowly, especially due to the inability to settle on decisions. Furthermore, clients are not there to check in on you throughout the project. By stepping up as Design Lead and client/developer facilitator, my team completed milestones on a timely basis while staying on top of critiques.
Our project never fully developed because of lost interest. Everything progressed pretty quickly at first with the excitement of creating an app for a real user base. But, as the summer went on, developers slowly dropped the project, our client responded less frequently, and the team got consumed by other work.
