'“Won the Best Experience and Design award BrainStation Hackathon 2022.”
ALT & BrainStation
ALT Community & User QR Code
OVERVIEW
In December of 2022, I participated in a week-long hackathon hosted by BrainStation and ALT with an opportunity to create a platform and introduce sports card as an investment opportunity among younger adults. I worked with multiple cross-functional teams that included a fellow product designer, 2 engineers, 2 data scientists and leads from BrainStation and ALT to have a clearer vision of the problem space and possible solution(s) to be proposed - with intent of standing out among the rest.
Since not everyone is greatly familiar with sports cards as well as its value, we wanted to spread awareness about the topic. So, what are sports card? Sports card investing is the act of treating sports trading cards like assets that appreciate over time and can make users a profit. In addition to services that ALT currently offers, our team wanted to create an additional feature that will allow users to access communities based on their preferred category (Baseball, Football, Basketball, Hockey, Pokemon, etc.) as well as a QR code of each profiles redirecting user to view other’s portfolio and collections.
CATEGORY
UX & UI
SERVICE
Hackathon
YEAR
2022
-
UX Researcher
UI Designer
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1 week
-
Figma
MEET THE TEAM
JUDGING CRITERIA
Innovation • Technical Execution • User & Market Research • Presentation & Pitch • Fit to Challenge • Group Collaboration
THE PROBLEM
How can we help ALT’s users navigate the world of trading goods and make more informed trading and investment decisions?
Given ALT’s problem statement, our team raised two (2) major problems: (1) There is a lack of awareness among young adults; (2) Current platforms are missing a community and/or sharing aspect. This led us to re-design the question to: How might we raise awareness towards sports cards as an investment opportunity and establish a sense of belonging and trust among users?
RESEARCH
We carried out research to determine ALT’s prospective customer base.
First, we found that the top 5 categories on ALT’s website are Basketball, Baseball, Football. Soccer and Pokemon, whereas the top categories found in the open source database were Baseball, Football, Basketball.
Based on the share of fans by gender, more males are avid sports fans than females.
With respect to interest in specific sports by age, basketball was more popular among younger males while baseball displayed the opposite.
KEY INSIGHTS
We focused our efforts on interviewing investors between the age of 20 to 35.
Collectively as a team, we were able to interview four (4) active investors including one (1) participant that is currently investing in sport cards. Hence, we gathered common motivations, challenges, and behaviors.
Lack of Trust
Lack of awareness towards sports cards - most participant are cautious and see it as high risk.
Like the art world, the value of sports cards relies on a number of factors, including its age, condition, and rating.
There are some key things to keep in mind, such as how to store the cards, where to buy them, and how to monitor their value.
Lack of Community
Existing communities or groups are limited and some are exclusive hence are non-accessible to the public, making it difficult for new investors to relate and find a sense of belonging.
To see research & Ideation process, click here
PERSONA
USER FLOW
DESIGN QUESTION
How might we raise awareness towards sports cards as an investment opportunity and establish a sense of belonging and trust among users?
OUR SOLUTION
Additional features to ALT’s current website.
Having the design challenge in mind, our team came up with the idea of adding a User QR Code - primarily to be used for accessing, sharing and viewing other user’s portfolios or card collections.
Next is a Community feature, allowing users to to have access to all communities based on categories they’re most interested to invest in. Each community group will have different usability features to provide awareness and learning such as a discussion feed where members can post and interact further through the comment section.
We believe that through this proposed solutions, we will be able to establish trust and sense of belonging among users - encouraging them to make wise investment decisions.
SKETCHES & WIREFRAMES
Note: We started with the intention of designing a feature for ALT’s mobile app. After discussing the ideation to our web developer team, we concluded that for due to the time constraint and taking our skills into consideration, we should design an additional feature for ALT’s website instead. The following shows our initial wireframes and sketches that later was turned into the website version.
HIGH-FIDELITY MOCKUPS
FINAL PROTOTYPE
NEXT STEPS
CONCLUSIONS + REFLECTION
Embrace that everything will change. I realized that when working on responsive designs, apps or other interfaces, everything will change constantly. So instead of getting frustrated, we embraced techniques that facilitate experimenting and initiated sketching session that led us to came up with good solutions together as a team within a short period of time.
Team Work. It was instilled to our minds a clear understanding as to why it is beneficial to work in teams. During the starting phase of research, we had to iterate design decisions that turned out to be very helpful as it gave us opportunities to adapt on new insights and priorities. We tracked our progress and problems through a daily discussion and huddles resulting to a better collaboration and decision making.
Do what’s needed. Before our team started sprinting, we dug deeper and conducted research on the actual website and the problem statement. We first wanted to have a clear understanding about sports card as an investment opportunity among users in order to craft an effective solution. The entire process was helpful as it gave us vital insights in advance of building.
For more work inquiries or if you want to grab a coffee with me, email me at sarrahditan@gmail.com ☕️
Thank you for reading!