Through building the Denver Squid Aquatics Club, I identified key pain points in sports management and developed a mobile app concept that streamlines team operations and community education. This project showcased my UX problem-solving abilities and helped secure my first UX role in cybersecurity.
Revolutionizing Sports Management Through UX
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My Role
Primary UX Designer
Team
1 UX Designer (Myself)
Design Timeline
4 weeks
This is an image of different high fidelity frames of this sports app project
Team management inefficiencies, disconnected communication channels, and scattered educational resources made sports club operations challenging.
Our sports club was struggling to efficiently manage our different sports teams and engage their community due to fragmented tools and processes. While managing Denver Squid Aquatics Club, I identified an opportunity to transform how coaches and administrators interact with team data, community could interact, and introduce educational content.
How might we help sports administrators efficiently manage teams while building community engagement?
What will help coaches and staff work more effectively?
Existing solutions focused mainly on basic management features and youth sports but lacked understanding of masters sports organizations' workflows and community needs. We needed solutions that better understand how teams actually operate to make informed design decisions.
Inspired by real experience managing Denver Squid Aquatics Club, I noticed sports teams facing fragmented management tools and disconnected community engagement, leading to inefficient operations and reduced team connectivity. A unified solution was needed to streamline team management while fostering educational content sharing and inter-team networking.
Core Objectives
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Design an intuitive mobile app for comprehensive sports team management
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Enable seamless community engagement and educational content sharing
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Create a platform for team-to-team connections and tournament organization
Project Stakeholders
Internal
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Denver Squid Aqautics Club
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Other Denver LGBT sports clubs
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Feel free to interact and scroll through wireframes I created for this mobile Sports app
What I observed
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Sports teams struggle managing information across multiple platforms, forcing constant app-switching
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Important team data, schedules, and educational content are scattered across different tools, making it hard to maintain organization
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Traditional sports apps don't align with how teams naturally handle management, education, and community engagement
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Teams lack an efficient way to connect with other teams for tournaments and networking opportunities
What the app needed
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Create a unified platform that matches teams' natural workflows
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Provide relevant team data and educational content in one place while maintaining operational flow
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Make the app as personalized as possible to enhance team spirit
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Make team management and community engagement seamless to improve efficiency
User-Centered Approach
Design Process
Understanding user needs was crucial in developing a sports management platform that could scale with teams' growing requirements.
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Drawing from direct experience managing and developing the Denver Squid Aquatics Club, I identified key pain points and opportunities
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Iterated rapidly on designs while maintaining consistent user experience
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Gathered continuous feedback through user testing with personal friends from the Denver Squid team.
The development process emphasized creating intuitive team management tools while building a foundation for community engagement features.
This was my initial take of user frames needed for different platform areas
While hypothetical, this design exercise demonstrated how understanding team operations and community needs could lead to more effective sports management solutions.
Existing solutions focused mainly on basic management features but lacked understanding of sports organizations' workflows and community needs. We needed to better understand how teams actually operate to make informed design decisions.
Takeaways
This initial app concept sparked my journey into UX design. What began as a fun side project and proposed solution for sports management unexpectedly led to opportunities in cybersecurity and complex UX projects.
Looking back at this project reminds me how far I've come—evolving from solving basic management challenges to tackling intricate user experiences in high-stakes environments.
Want to see more?
I am happy to talk through my research and design work for my sports app project during a scheduled call.