In order to  tackle this design challenge, I conducted a user-centered research, adopting several research techniques, with the aim of learning more about the football industry, how the scouting process works, difficulties young football players face, and how does communication happen between the football players, scouts and coaches. This helped me identify their challenges and needs, so that I can later use them as a starting point for ideation and later redesign of the platform.

For this project I adopted the design thinking process as a framework to support my design decisions and give me direction. I went through the 5 stages of the design thinking process - empathise, ideate, define, prototype, test.  Because of the nature of this project and the current state of the platform, this assignment gave me the opportunity to practice and demonstrate all of the UX competences that are necessary for me to work on such a big scope project alone.

Simple rule, to create a product, I need to know who my target audience is, what their interests are, what their pain points are, etc. This information helps to remove unnecessary functions and focus on key features which our audience really needs. Surveys and interviews with real users helps a lot.

The research phase of this project consisted of user interviews, surveys, benchmarking and stakeholder interviews. After analysis of the collected data, I translated the insights into user personas and user stories that will guide me through the next steps of the design thinking process.

The potential users of the newly redesigned platform will be young football players, who aspire to grow in the industry, their coaches that want to help them achieve that by training them efficiently and scouts who are looking to identify potential football talents.

For the ideation phase, I decided to conduct two creative sessions, one with the client company and one on my own. I wanted to see the point of view of the other stakeholders and generate ideas based on their opinions. I made use of 3 diverging techniques that helped me generate a bunch of ideas. However, some of them were quite irrelevant.

In order to narrow them down. I did an affinity diagram, dividing the ideas into 3 main sections, for the 3 personas of the platform. To further organise them, I did color coding based on the 7 main needs of the user. Bellow you can find the final clustered ideas that I used together with the ones from the other creative session as a starting point for developing the design concept.

After developing the sitemap for the information architecture of the platform I moved on to wireframing. The wireframes I created were only focused on visualising the basic layout and flow of the design. I wanted to define what elements I should include and where they should be placed, but without being distracted by content or visual details. I also wanted to visualise the functionalities and the information hierarchy, so that I have a solid foundation to work with when including the visual aesthetics and content.

I tried to include all the features from the final concept, however I decided to leave the landing page, onboarding, community page, messaging system and motivational quotes out of the prototype. The wireframes were left non-clickable as I was only planning to test the prototype and wanted to develop the interaction design there, the wireframes I only used as the skeleton for my design.

I started the prototyping phase by defining the fonts I will use, the colors, and the grid system as well as spacing. I also made use of auto-layout when designing some of the components, such as the cards, buttons and lists to ensure there is consistency in my design in terms of alignment, spacing and propotions between the different elements.

I tried to keep the visual hierarchy logical and make use of familiar design patterns throughout the platform so the interface is intuitive and guides the user. It is important to mention that the content generated for the platform is mainly about the moroccan football team and the football industry there, as my client is currently negotiating with potential investors (Football officials from the Moroccan national team).

Once the prototype was developed into high fidelity and had enoough content to make it realistic as well as the main functionalities were clickable, I moved on with testing to check if the prototype works as intended. I defined 3 main objectives for the user testing: evaluate the usability, the satisfaction of the user and the completition of tasks given. In order to keep the testing sessions structured, I developed a testing protocol and checklist.

All of the participants gave a positive feedback in general, seeing the platform as well structured, intuitive to navigate and with the right choice of functionalities. I am also happy that none of the participants took too long to achieve any of the tasks.

All in all, I am happy with the solution outcome. Considering the fact that I agreed on developing only an MVP and still managed to meet all the user needs, I believe that the launch of a fully-functional platform with all the recommendations considered would have a great impact on the football industry and support each stakeholder involved.