USER PERSONA: Based on our research from user interviews and survey results, we created our user persona: Sam McDougal. He is a 34-year-old sales manager who recently moved to Boston. He travels often for work and leisure and practices tennis about three times a week.

Sam struggles to find a reliable practice partner to play tennis with because he's new to the city and COVID has made it difficult to meet new people. He is hoping to meet his health and fitness goals by connecting with people nearby to play sports together.

PROBLEM STATEMENT: Sam, a tennis player who wants to consistently train three times a week, has trouble finding a reliable practice partner and overcoming scheduling conflicts.

How might we help athletes at all levels resolve their scheduling conflicts by connecting them with reliable partners?

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS: View our full comparison matrix here.

For direct competitors, we chose to focus on Meetup and Play Your Court.

Meetup is primarily used for group networking events but we wanted to study how they built a platform for accommodating group meetups. We really liked how they were able to show all different kinds of upcoming events nearby, whether it be on short notice or in advance.

Play Your Court is a specialized app for tennis players only. They facilitate practice, matches and lessons in the area. Play Your Court has a similar goal to what we are looking to acheive and we noted their shortcomings. Some of which are that it's a paid service and that depending on the city, there may not be enough players on the app.

For indirect competitors, we have Doodle and Calendly. They are both popular scheduling platforms. Since scheduling conflicts were a big frustration that was voiced by our interview and survey participants, we really wanted to study two of the largest scheduling platforms used in the workplace. We noted that Doodle is great for scheduling stand alone meetings among several people, while calendly was great for 1 on 1 meetings.

I LIKE, I WISH, WHAT IF... BRAINSTORM: We utilized the I like, I wish, What if method to brainstorm ideas for app features.

We dot voted to select some of our top favorites which included:
• I like playing sports with other people
• I like playing multiple sports
• I like syncing my calendar with others
• I wish I could see everyone's available practice times
• What if I could see all the nearby courts, wait times, and availibility in real time?

USER JOURNEY MAP: To better visualize an ideal typical first interaction with our app, we created a user journey map.

It starts off with Sam wanting to play tennis so he creates a Sportally account. The short onboarding process keeps up with his initial excitement. So he creates a new event for tennis for the upcoming weekend.

He begins to receive several requests from players nearby to join his event. He is a little skeptical at first and may be slightly overwhelmed with looking at profiles and accepting and declining requests. But he continues on and is able to confirm the event and message the participants that he accepted.

Sam's excitement builds for the upcoming practice. Everyone shows up that weekend and they have a great practice session. They are able to add each other as friends after the game so they can easily set up more pratice sessions in the future.

PRIMARY USER FLOWS: We chose to focus our attention on the onboarding process which includes creating the profile with your basic info and the sports that you play. Enabling location is also crucial for providing the user with nearby events and players.

Our second workflow is searching for nearby events and requesting to join one. We wanted an easy "discover events nearby" option for users to quickly skim and join events that they may be interested in.

Our third workflow is creating an event. The user would create a practice session of their own. And upon creation, that event would then be discoverable by other players in the area.