Reserve a tennis court ahead of time! Less waiting and more hitting.
Problem
Where public parks are the number one solution to play tennis, it becomes a gamble to find an open court. Players may find themselves waiting for up to an hour or driving to different parks to finally find somewhere to play. I wanted to explore a solution that could save time and limit down time.
Overview
In the era of public parks, "first come, first serve," and a lack of common courtesy, securing a sports facility can be tough; players spend more time waiting for a court than actually playing on it. This can be avoided with Sweet Spot, an app that allows players to reserve their courts ahead of time.
Project roles
Product design: user research, user experience, and visual design
Research
I already know that this problem exists because I experience it first hand so I wanted to see if others also consider this a recurring problem as well.
User Research
To begin the research process, I sent out a general sports survey to see if this was a universal problem that people experienced.
A few examples of the questions asked are:
- What sports do you play?
- How do you pick your facility?
- Do you reserve it?
- How long do you wait for your facility?
- What's stopping you from playing more often and/or longer?
After sending the survey to my cohort, I received 27 responses. Fortunately, over 50% of the users play tennis and could offer relevant insight. Not only do they have the similar problem but they also experience not having the time to play and not having anyone to play with.
Personas
A few survey takers were interviewed to establish the three user personas that this app would serve: the working mom, the new kid on the block, and the herder.
These users' highest priorities would be:
- Signing up an account with an email
- Finding a tennis court based on location
- Reserving a tennis court
- Viewing tennis courts on a map
- Cancel court reservations
- Find a tennis court that is currently not in use
After solidifying the user stories, the content strategy became clearer, thus creating the site map and user flows.
Branding
The branding began with the ideation of the name of the product which would come after a brainstorm of all the tennis terms that would come to mind. As soon as I got to “sweet spot,” which refers to the spot on the racquet that minimizes force on the hands on ball impact, I knew it was the perfect name because it could serve as a double entendre for “the perfect location.”
Once I had the name, I was able to visualize the logo: an “S” or two over a ball to look like a tennis ball, or the words “sweet spot” over a tennis racquet. After feedback that two S’s would sort of resemble a Nazi symbol, I strayed away from that idea and finalized one S which would end up looking very similar to a tennis ball.
The colors were inspired by some of the grand slams and the bright green from a tennis ball, thus leading to the the final logo:
Initial mockups and iterations
Below is the prototype of the initial mockups.
After some feedback, iterations were made which are shown below:
After these changes were implemented, further user research was done with the updated version was tested using Maze.design.
After the test, the feedback was positive! However, it users had the following feedback:
- Have a different call-to-action style for the logout (like changing it's color), since it's a significant action
- Search, for both courts and people
- Change the date picker to a slide up drawer, similar to the change in park results shown earlier
- Cancel reservations (which should have been available from the get-go, an oversight on my part)
- Messaging need its own screen and not just accessible through notifications
- The bottom navigation didn't look it belonged to iOS
After implementing these changes, I felt like I had a real MVP for this app.
Solution
The app concept of Sweet Spot solves the problem of having trouble finding a tennis court by allowing players to reserve a tennis court ahead of time.
What I've learned and takeaways
While I am satisfied with the research process put into this app, given more time, I would have done a second competitive analysis on apps and services that match you with tennis partners.
Doing a project so personal to me made it feel like the project was creating itself. The user research was a lot of my tennis peers nodding in agreement and wishing an app like this already existed. I welcomed the constructive feedback very warmly and the engagement with the product made me more excited to improve upon and work on it.
The drawback to an app like this is that, in theory, it makes sense. However, its real time application is questionable - even a user test response asked, “How effective will this be when reserving public courts?” Convincing local governments to use and monitor new locks for the courts could prove difficult.
The idea for a tennis court reservation app was an idea I had during frustration amidst finding, or failing to find, a tennis court during a busy weekend. While this is a proof of concept, I hope it’s an idea that can become a reality and developing this prototype is a step towards that.
"Wow I wish this existed. I'd love to be able to reserve a court ahead of time."