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Steady: Supporting Your Sports Journey

About the Project

Despite advancements in sports psychology, many athletes struggle with issues such as performance anxiety, lack of motivation, and difficulty in maintaining focus during competitions, impacting their overall athletic performance and mental well-being. Steady aims to bridge the relationships and resources between student-athletes, coaches, and sports psychologists, making student transition into college smoother and setting them up to use these resources whenever needed. 

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Utilizing various methods of service design prototyping, our team was able to pinpoint our minimal viable product as well as determine the logistics of when and where to introduce our service.

My Role

Service Designer

UX Lead

Time Frame

10 Weeks 

Spring 2024

Tools Used

Figma

Figjam

Legos

Design Process

Industry Research
Stakeholder & Ecosystem Analysis
Identifying Opportunity Space
User Research Through Survey
Customer Journey Mapping

Opportunities and KPIs
Desktop Walkthrough
Developing User-flow
 

Multi-touchpoint Mapping

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Conversational Prototyping

 

Low-fi Wireframing

 

Paper-Prototype Testing

 

Refining Digital Interactions

 

Branding & Design System

 

Final Pitch

 

Further Research Plan

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The Data

We got 48 survey responses from student-athletes in U.S. universities and without surprise 100% all experienced stress relating to sports. Not only is there an absolute need for a service to help the student's, but multiple studies echo the lack of support staff is able to give to their student-athletes.​​​​

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The Current Reality

We developed a customer journey map based on our secondary and primary user research to visualize what a typical student athlete's experience entering college may be.
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Two Key Moments:

1. When the student first faces a struggle (e.g., pressure to perform, trouble adapting, balancing academics, trouble in team dynamics)

2. When student's are aware of the resources but don’t follow through. 
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Our Vision

At this stage, we envisioned a service introduced preemptively to athletes to proactively reduce the feeling of being stuck in a period of struggle without the resources to reach out.

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Creating a physical representation of our initial vision for the future state of our service helped spark questions and concerns that needed to be addressed.​​​

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Our desktop walkthrough process resulted in lots of discussion and ideas surrounding how our service could be introduced to incoming athletes.

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Key Interactions & Touchpoints

Our service will be introduced to the athlete before they arrive at college; onboarding is required for all freshmen. Following the desktop walkthrough discussion, we want to ensure the service is also introduced in a physical setting to help foster familiarity.

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Refining our Onboarding User-Flow Through Conversational Prototyping

This flowchart outlines the initial onboarding process, informed by our desktop walkthrough. We involved classmates in this conversational prototyping to ensure the onboarding process is smooth, informative, and friendly. We don’t expect users to interact with the entire service immediately.

It also ensures that athletes are aware of our service as a valuable tool and resource for their sports journey. One of our core values is to act as a friend along the journey, utilizing the AI chatbot to actively engage with users.

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User-Testing: Validating Features

We developed mid-fidelity wireframes to test specific features of our service from the perspectives of both student-athletes and psychologists. Our goal was to validate the service interactions and the human-bot relationships.

We refined the app's flow and usability, detailing each feature. A key element we tested is the 'emotion check-in,' which also appears from the psychologist's perspective to assess athletes and determine the best approaches to keep them active and healthy.

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Final Concept:

Steady aims to bridge the relationships and resources between student-athletes, coaches, and sports psychologists,

making their transition into college smoother and setting them up to use these resources whenever they need them in the future.

Onboarding Experience

Our onboarding creates a friendly and welcoming introduction to Steady & Teddy, providing our athletes a smooth and efficient experience to get on track.

Prepopulated Fields
Basic information will be automatically filled in from the college, making the process easier.

Personalization
Our onboarding questions are designed to cater to the specific needs of each student-athlete.

Privacy
Athletes have the option of who to share their preferences with depending on their needs.

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Proactively Adressing User Needs

By familiarizing student-athletes with Steady before their college journey starts, and automatically prompting users to set up sessions, they are more likely to feel comfortable reaching out when challenges do arise. 

Through longer use of Steady, ideally student-athletes are prevented from reaching the "bridge" / painpoints to begin with.

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Emotion Check-In

By familiarizing student-athletes with Steady before their college journey starts, and automatically prompting users to set up sessions, they are more likely to feel comfortable reaching out when challenges do arise. 

Through longer use of Steady, ideally student-athletes are prevented from reaching the "bridge" / painpoints to begin with.

A Space to Reflect

Steady's profile page reveals trends based on the collected data that allow student-athletes to reflect and take action. 

By viewing their progress and trends Steady's provides motivation to accomplish different activities and help form regular habits.

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Information Architecture

After completing this group project, I went back to restructure the app's organization and build consistency within the visual identity.

By adding quick links to "book meeting" or "add an activity" users are encouraged to take action as they reflect on their insights. 
 

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Design System

As a service, Steady is always there to support student-athletes. The app components and branding were created to echo Steady's inviting and friendly feel while balancing clear and professional elements to provide a sense of security for the student-athlete. 

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What If?

If we take this project forward, our next steps would involve conducting more in-depth interviews with sports psychologists to understand further the features from the sports psychologist's point of view. Replicating the specific interactions that occur within Steady between the athlete and sports psychologist would help validate the service. 

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