Court Connect

An environment for tennis players to meet new people, find new places, and look for help.

My Role: UX Researcher & UI Designer

Timeline: January 2024 - May 2024

Overview

As a tennis player myself, I often found it difficult to locate nearby courts and facilities, people to play with, ways to improve my game, and information on gear. In order to remedy this, I devised a way to consolidate all of these tasks into one design solution. Through both preliminary and primary research, I found other users' pain points and established an idea. From here, I created low-fidelity prototypes of the system, tested it, and iterated to finish with a polished, hi-fidelity deliverable.

Project Timeline

Secondary Research

A look at the competition

To start off this project, I decided to gain some preliminary knowledge about the market. To do this, I found three similar competitors to my proposed idea, and analyzed them based on their features and information. I also conducted a heuristic analysis on each of the sites to deduce how well their site is designed.

Sites

CCA Sports

A recreational sports website that allows users to view and register for various leagues throughout the Indianapolis area.

Strava

An application catering to athletes (runners, cyclists, etc.) where they can track their physical activity, connect with friends and communities, join clubs, and more.

TennisPAL

A mobile application that creates a hub for tennis players to create community posts, find hitting partners, and locate nearby courts.

What I found…

I analyzed the three platforms based on their novel features against each other, as well as the general information about the application (Cost, Affordability, Userbase, and Platform). Seeing these features compared helped me get a grasp of what I needed to implement into my own product, like which applications are lacking in certain areas.

What do others have to say?

To study an online community of potential users, I chose the subreddit r/10s, which is a community on Reddit dedicated to help amateur tennis players communicate about technical advice, strategy, equipment, and more.

I looked through 202 posts and categorized each of them into a conversation type. Doing this helped me gain an understanding of the main things tennis players use a community forum for, and also what their main needs are as players.

So what do people lack?

Advice on gear

Access to coaching

Talking to users

Surveys & Interviews

Once I completed my competitive analysis to discover what other products on the market are like, I switched focus to primary research. For my study, I sent out a survey with qualitative and quantitative questions. The survey was completed by 10 users, all being college students and current or former tennis players. These questions focused on users' tennis experience, amount of play, and opinions regarding their motivation and progress.

After the surveys were completed, I conducted 6 semi-structured interviews with those who volunteered. These interviews focused on users' backgrounds within tennis, their pain points with finding matches, hitting partners, improvement, and information about gear.

Common Issues

I grouped pain points and feedback through affinity mapping as seen on the graphic here. I organized each piece of data into categories and noted down the number of users who stated that each point was an issue. The core issues and pain points found were:

Inability to find league matches to play
Desire to play more tennis
Only able to self-learn and improve without coaching
Too expensive

From these findings, it was clear that these tennis players want to play more but do not have the resources or knowledge of where and/or how to do so.

Personas

Once I got my research with users done, I created these two personas that focus on the experiences of the people I spoke to in order to guide me through my design: