Athlete home experience

Opendorse launched a mobile app in the Spring of 2020 to give athletes an easy way to receive media from their institution and receive notifications when they had content to publish or deals to accept (for professional athletes). While the majority of student athlete usage has been on mobile, either on the app or a mobile browser, the mobile app has fallen behind in parity with the web platform.

After the launch of NIL for student athletes on July 1st 2021, the mobile app was a prime space to move a lot of NIL and deal-specific features, such as opportunities to apply for and disclose deals, and a robust settings page with all profile editing capabilities. 

• How do we bring together users who knew our platform as a place to receive media (athletes signed up prior to July 1st) and users who knew us as a place to get NIL opportunities (athletes signed up post July 1st)? 

• How do we transition our app to be a place student-athletes spend more of their time?

• How do we highlight all our platform has to offer to athletes who may not know?

• Bring a consistent app experience to all the different athlete personas that use our app.

• Elevate important information and actionable content across our many platform features to athletes, specifically student athletes, so they know what to do as soon as they enter the app.

• Product Designer & Researcher - Erica Boyle
• Product Manager - Ethan Horne
• Engineers - Cole Easterday, Bobby Gagnon, Lara Komosa, Aaron Bos
• Quality Engineer - Matt Sheets

I created a low fidelity wireframe of a proposed homepage experience to show to athletes as a tool to spark conversation and ideation. I removed any use of color and changed any unimportant data on screen to be skeleton elements. What remained were section headings and main calls to action to help the athlete get an idea of what they’d be experiencing. This allowed them to expand upon what they thought would be in the section, or what they’d want a section to include. I chose to focus on 5 main sections to have the athlete consider: a dashboard, onboarding activities, deal opportunities they’d be interested in based on their profile, notifications they have been sent, and education about NIL and our product. 

I set up 5 conversations with student athletes from different sports, schools, and divisions. Each conversation was 30-45 minutes over Zoom, where I led the interview and 1 to 2 other team members listened in and took notes. The goals of these conversations were to:

• Understand what elements student athletes would want on their homepage
• Determine priority of elements on the home page 
• Understand if navigation changes will make sense to athletes 

The known assumptions were that athletes currently need a better landing page when they come into the app, and that athletes would want everything included in the wireframe of the homepage.

It was determined that this experiment would be successful if: 

• 100% of the athletes interviewed expressed excitement for this feature
• 100% of the athletes found value in at least 2 sections of the homepage

The first half of each conversation was open dialog around how the athlete has used our tools, and what they’d want out of a homepage prior to seeing my design. Then the second half of the conversation focused on my wireframe and gathering feedback on it.

The key takeaways from these conversations were:

• The opportunities based on interests section was a huge hit, and should be prioritized higher on the page.
  • Prior to seeing the wireframe, the opportunities feature was pointed out by all 5 athletes as one of the main reasons they came into the app.
  • When asked on the priority of what they would want to see on this page, 3 out of 5 said opportunities.
• The education and the "Trending NIL Topics" section produced deep conversation around what athletes would want to see here, including: 
  • How-To's on Opendorse features
  • Education on NIL and tips for athletes around negotiation, reaching out to brands, or turning down a deal
  • What other athletes are doing in NIL
• The “Building your brand” onboarding section was a hit or miss due to vague headings and calls to action – but the concept of athletes building out their "storefront" (public profile) intrigued all 5 athletes.
• All athletes were extremely excited about this feature and could see it being useful to them right away. 
• We learned that we needed to add media that an athlete has recently been tagged in or shared to the homepage - a section I had not previously considered.

2 out of the 3 goals set at the beginning of the experiment were met. The only goal not met was validating that any navigation changes would make sense to athletes. Both success metrics were validated, with all 5 athletes expressing excitement, plus all 5 athletes found value in at least 2 of the 5 sections.

What we set out to do next:

• Create a high-fidelity home mockup that applied feedback from this experiment.
• Create a story map to prioritize findings based on these conversations
• Further define success metrics for the MVP based on these. For example, we heard that the opportunities section was desired, but would the data show that athletes are interacting with that section on the homepage?

Taking the feedback from the low fidelity wireframe research, I created a high fidelity mockup that included all the features the athletes loved fleshed out further. This mockup included all the features that would be nice to have, and was used to determine what would be built in each version determined in our story map. The opportunities section was moved higher on the page, and the notification section was removed due to it having the least amount of interest from athletes. The education section was included, but simplified for the first version to direct the athletes to existing Opendorse education resources. 

After building the high fidelity prototype that better depicted what athletes wanted, I presented this concept to my squad’s main stakeholder group, and a separate cross-functional group that focused on the athlete experience. Through these conversations, the feedback that I gained and implemented was:

• The quick actions might not be helpful for all athletes, since not all athletes would see the same actions. This section of the dashboard was removed until we saw a need for them.
• Encouraging athletes to cash out on the homepage was flagged as something that went against larger business objectives for athletes to save their money and think of our product as a bank account. Due to this feedback, the call to action was changed to “Manage balance” and took the athlete deeper into the product to their payments page.
• Our decision to de-prioritize notifications as a section on the homepage was challenged, because a metric that many other departments based their success on was the athlete response rate of these notifications. I took this feedback back to the drawing board and in a later iteration added a callout to notifications on screen that wasn’t as costly to build as the actual notification cards.

After the creation of the high fidelity mockup, I conducted 2 more conversations with athletes to validate that what was going to be built would indeed match their needs. In these conversations, I was able to ask questions around navigation that I wasn’t able to ask in the first round of interviews. I also was able to confirm that these athletes didn’t miss the notifications section or the quick actions that were removed. Education and dashboard metrics continued to be main topics of these conversations, which my product manager and I took note of as future research items.