Phase 1 — Discover:

TO THE NIKE STORE

The app is free but the Adapt BB’s have a price tag of $350 and is the most expensive basketball shoe on the market. One of our initial project constraints was that we didn’t have a budget to purchase the shoes, and therefore initially unable to access full app functionality.

To view full app functionality, we took a trip to the Nike store at The Grove mall to examine the shoe, the app and chat with the store employees to get their perspective and customer experiences.

Discoveries made after talking with Nike store employees:

Who uses the Adapt BB shoes and app?

What pain points are existing users experiencing?

Why not just solve these pain points and call it a day?

Because all these pain points are software-based and if resolved doesn’t address regular non-NBA basketball player pain points.

If a basketball shoe like the Adapt BB is so important then why not do more with this app? How can we think outside the app’s current and albeit limited functions to create additional value? 

So, with that challenge set. We jumped into a thorough process.

MEETING THE PLAYERS

We conducted user interviews to understand the needs and pain points of users with the shoe and app. In addition, we also interviewed basketball players that play in a league along with college basketball students to see what do they currently do to improve their game.

Interview insights:

LEVELING UP

After gathering insights from our Nike store visit and user interviews, we conducted a comparative + competitive analysis to examine other high-end products that sync with an app. Our goal was to find features that could be useful for basketball players.

Some products and apps that caught our attention:

• Nest, Philips Sonicare, and Netflix track data and provide recommendations.

• Nike Training Club and Adidas have pro tips, how-to’s, and training libraries.

• HomeCourt and Salted Venture feature innovative movement-tracking practices
  and sport-specific drills.

THE HIGHLIGHTS

Now for the fun part, research synthesis! In order to uncover the core issues of our users and identify patterns, we developed an affinity map based on our user interviews. The major findings we uncovered were:

• The shoe may be novel but the app is no more than a showy accessory to the shoe. Novelty dies off.

• Serious basketball players want to improve their game. But they don’t have coaches. They learn by watching, doing, and putting in work on their own time.

• Street ballers are passionate about their game. They follow the pros closely, watch highlights regularly, and consume a lot of basketball media.

Phase 2 — Define:

OUR PLAYER, TY JAKOBS

Creating the affinity map helped us pinpoint the user we are designing for. Using our research as the foundation, we were able to create our persona and portray the needs and frustrations that we will be targeting. Designing for Ty guided our design decisions by always keeping the end-user in mind.

*disclaimer: it was not our intention to relate the name of our persona to our product, a self-lacing shoe.

HELPING TY

After years of wear and tear on the body from high school and college basketball, Ty aims to stay injury-free and improve his performance going into the next season. He’s looking for an app that can track real-time activity data and provide training protocols and sports-specific drills to test and enhance agility, vertical jump, and strength.

But later we would realize this is not the problem we should be focusing on. Stay Tuned.

Phase 3 — Design

THE DRAWING BOARD

We conducted a design studio to rapidly generate wireframe ideas, but what we discovered instead was that our problem was the wrong problem to solve for. 

We focused too hard on making this an injury prevention app by having the user specify the injury during the onboarding process to curate specific training videos to prevent further injury. We also almost got lost in designing off the shoe’s unlocked tech of retrieving data and analyzing it on the app. Here’s where you could see where we got off track:

FOCUS ON THE APP, NOT THE SHOE

Here’s what we focused on to develop our MVP (Minimum Viable Product):

• Design off the shoe’s current capabilities, despite its unlocked technology

• Shift the focus of the app from injury prevention to athletic performance

NEW GAME PLAN

Ty has been frustrated with numerous fitness apps that provide limited biometric measurements and basketball-specific content. He’s looking for an app that can provide an extensive library of drills, training videos and performance measurements designed to improve ball handling, reaction time, agility and overall performance.

WHAT A GOOD TRAINING APP NEEDS

With Ty in mind, we began brainstorming features that could help solve his problem. We utilized the "MoSCoW" (Must have-, Should-haves, Could-haves, Won’t-haves) method to prioritize and focus on impactful, high-value features. We also referred back to our C+C Analysis to determine which features were essential from a competitive standpoint, versus those that were non-essential.

TY’S TRAINING PROGRAM

Now that we had an idea of which features we were going to prioritize, training drills being the main focus, we needed to layout the task Ty would accomplish. Below you’ll see the flow of Ty:

• Searching for a tutorial

• Searching for a drill to perform

• Checking out his overall performance stats in his profile.

BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD

Redefining the problem, prioritizing features and establishing the user flow, we facilitated a second design studio to sketch the first set of low fidelity wireframes.

WHAT DO THE PLAYERS THINK?

To validate design choices & uncover pain points, we utilized mid-fi wireframes to create an InVision prototype to test on 8 users.

Here’s what we discovered during our usability tests: