The Lucky Lunker
CLIENT
private
RELEASE
nov 15, 2020
INDUSTRY
competitive fishing
PRODUCT
web app
the challenge
As an avid competitive fisherman, Lucky Lunker's founder was familiar with the usability issues of existing tournament management platforms. Having bounced around ideas with his peers, he found that many other fisherfolk had similar concerns. Thus the initial concept for Lucky Lunker was born - a new community that helps tournament hosts effectively manage events and connect to participants.
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Lucky Lunker next needed investor support to transition this idea into a usable product. While its founder brought the industry knowledge, a team of UX and UI designers was needed to design a functional website prototype.
my role
Working with a team of two other designers, I primarily focused on the research efforts of this project. I provided a supporting role in the design workshop and created our research preparation materials. I also led the competitive analysis. During the interview process, I was responsible for observing the participants and conducted the data analysis following the conclusion of our research.
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the design workshop
Lucky Lunker's journey began with a collaborative two day design workshop led by the Bytelion design team. Using the classic tools - pen, paper, and whiteboards - the client and design team worked on numerous activities with the goal of defining the target users, their problems, and begin to ideate solutions.
1. how might we's and mapping
WHY?
To ideate and organize the differing goals for the target users
The client and the designers put themselves in the shoes of the two user groups (tournament hosts and participants) and started thinking through their needs and goals. After sharing and discussing our ideas on sticky notes, we organized the points into groups to begin prioritizing the main functions of the platform.
2. information architecture
WHY?
To add structure to the ideas and goals that fit user needs
We decided to start with the core pages we knew Lucky Lunker would need to function: a homepage for sharing tournament information, a page for tournament details, and the registration process. We then organized features within these pages based on the user needs we ideated in the previous exercise.
3. concept sketching
WHY?
To visualize concepts and better understand client's ideas.
In this activity, our team and the client made quick sketches for how we envisioned the webpages we defined in the last exercise. While we knew this would be far from the final product, this gave our team some insights on what the client valued and how he interpreted the feedback he had been collecting from other avid fishers.
4. dot voting
WHY?
To consolidate ideas and begin prioritizing features for testing
After a few minutes of evaluating the designs and asking questions, my team and the client spent time placing stickers on the sketches to vote on our must-haves (green), nice to haves (orange), and do not need features (pink). While these were based on assumptions, it gave my team an informed direction for our first prototype.
the competitor analysis
Since Lucky Lunker's concept was born out of the usability gaps of its competitors, it was important for our team to understand what the competitors offered and how Lucky Lunker could provide additional value to the market.
Through an in-depth feature audit of each competitor, we were able to highlight features from our design session that were unique to Lucky Lunker that we would emphasize in our first designs.
the initial design
Our next step was to come together as a design team and create a cohesive design with all the information we have collected up to this point.
We identified the following themes and features to focus on for our MVP:
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Help participants easily find tournaments
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Provide participants clear details about tournaments, including prize pools
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Create a seamless registration process
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Establish a community through engaging personal profiles
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Allow users to host and manage tournaments
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Display tournament leaderboards to increase engagement
After a few more hand sketches, we took our concepts to Sketch and InVision to create a clickable prototype ready for user testing.
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the testing
Over the course of a week, we invited 6 local fishermen to our office to conduct concept and usability testing on our clickable prototype.
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Using an interview protocol that helped us collect consistent feedback on features we wanted to target, we spoke to these users about their background with fishing and their interests in the industry before introducing our design.
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Participants were first asked to navigate through the design and provide verbal feedback on their impressions of the design and features. Once this was done, we had participants complete tasks so we could understand where they would expect to find these features on a tournament platform.
Through user testing, we were able to identify the following:
users liked...
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How easy the platform was to use
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The amount of information they were provided about tournaments
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The dynamic leaderboard
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How hosts can manage and interact with registrants
areas of improvement include...
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Making it easier to find the button to host a tournament
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Breaking the tournament registration into smaller pages
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Displaying draft vs. active tournaments in a clearer way
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Placing personal tournaments in a more obvious location
the results
After we made edits to the design following user testing, the Lucky Lunker prototype was pitched to investors. Funding for the concept was secured and the client returned to make additional feature edits and develop the product.
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On November 15, 2020, the beta version of the Lucky Lunker was launched.
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Check it out here!