Slash App
Sports | UX | Mobile App Design
2017
The Slash App
The Slash App is an app for a community of snowboarders to stay connected and progress together, wherever they are.
The Initial Research
The initial research was to understand the habits and behaviors of snowboarders. I targeted specifically the snowboarders that venture into the terrain park. I interviewed a number of them and these were the findings:
- Many snowboarders have goals and want to progress.
- Many snowboarders care what their friends are up to and where they are riding.
- Snowboarding is a growing community/sport and many people are starting now.
- A good typical day snowboarding is being with friends, good weather, well-maintained terrain park, and not getting hurt.
- Some snowboarders take progressing more seriously than others, while others are just here to have fun.
- Some snowboarders only have access to a small hill with only a terrain park.
- Others who have access to a bigger mountain like to mix it up by cruising the mountain, dipping into the trees, and not just stay in the terrain park.
Dig Deeper: What I want to focus on
Many snowboarders have goals and want to progress.
Many snowboarders care what their friends are up to.
I wanted to learn more about these behaviors and test to see if there was something worth making for the community of snowboarders.
The two research findings I found to be most interesting were:
Questions on snowboarders goals and progression:
- How do you progress? Tools you use in order to speed up progression?
- What do you do to learn a new trick?
- How do you decide what you want to learn?
- How do you feel doing each of the steps?
- Do you wish the process was different? If so, how?
- Do you prepare for tricks off the mountain?
How people stay connected:
- Social media
- Communities like Reddit and other forums
- Contacts through phone
- Having a pattern of going to the same resort every weekend and naturally seeing your friends there.
- Shared transportation on these long trips to the mountain (e.g. ski/snowboard tour buses, carpooling)
Prototype: Merging what I learned
Many snowboarders have goals and want to progress.
Many snowboarders care what their friends are up to.
When breaking down the experience that snowboarders take from point A to B, I’ve identified the steps they take to progress and stay connected. What are the problems around them and how could this be improved?
Identify the problems:
Snowboarders are overwhelmed by the discovery of tricks.
Documentation of trick progress is unorganized making it hard to get feedback from your friends.
When I broke down the problems, I found that overall it is hard to learn a new trick because of many factors. There are countless amount of tricks from beginner to advanced. It’s hard to know where to start as there is a ton of content out there that is not specific enough to your level of skill or to the one-trick you're trying to learn. Learning from your friends and recording yourself to review are the most helpful factors in learning to snowboard. So these are the main issues I’ve identified:
“I rely on watching people do the trick and getting feedback from others on my trick. When someone told me to lean a little more on my heels instead of going toe heavy that really helped me progress a lot.”
- Snowboarder
Goals & Oppotunities:
How might we decide what trick to pick that fits your ability level?
How might we organize documentation for feedback?
Examples of tricks at different levels to help customers gauge where they fit can be from featured “trick of the day”, challenging others to do the trick, watching videos of other snowboarders for inspiration, and motivating each other on the mountain.
Some ways to get feedback from your friends at the fullest potential are by documenting your videos to be shared and letting them see your progress. Then categorizing the documentation by the type of tricks so it’s easier to track your progress.
Exploration of initial app design
The initial app design involved deciding on the core features: 1. Social feed, 2.Directory of tricks, 3. Record 4. challenge your friends, and 5. documentation/profile of activities.
The initial design takes you directly to following your friends and having the social feed as your home. But that took away from the main purpose; to find a new trick, learn it, and tracking your own progress.The social aspect should be a secondary enhanced feature that follows and encourages the user’s learning process. Below demonstrates the order of how the launch was originally designed:
Redesigned user flow with the wireframe:
I redesigned the flow with this change in mind to make sure that the discovering of tricks is a lot faster to access. Users will have easy access to tutorials and learn tricks step by step. As a snowboarder, there is more to learning a trick than just watching one video. The whole process in learning a trick includes finding more examples of how it’s done differently by other snowboarders stylistically, analyzing your process, and asking for feedback. The enhanced social aspect is what motivates the users to want to post videos of their progression to get that feedback. Being able to record conveniently and organize all the tricks in your own library makes it easy for the user to look back to their progress.
What's next
Overall, there is still a lot more to explore with the Slash App. What if there was a way to access personal training for snowboarders wanting to learn? Is there a way to connect snowboarders of the same skills to learn together? These are just some of the questions I'd like to expand on as I continue to work on this project. But for now, feel free to check out my design exercise.
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