SkiMate App Design — UX/UI Case Study
for skiing lovers from a skiing lover.
Briefing: The game rules
- Goal: Designing a complete digital product. No theme restrictions! 🚀
- Role: Individual project.
- Duration: 2 weeks.
(Let me say sorry because all my original work images are in Spanish although I’ve tried to explain everything in English. I promise I’ll try to work my stuff in English next time 🙇🏻♀️).
UX Research
“What the hell do I do?”
First day of work, first crisis: what the hell do I do? Could seem more easy make a proyect when you have all the liberty to explore but it is double-edged.
After a big headache, I thought that it is difficult to find another opportunity to spend 2 weeks doing a project 100% mine, so I decided to take advantage of it and make something related to one of my hobbies: skiing.
Starting to build something cool
Well, I had already something to star the investigation. Next step: launching a survey to begin to see possible pain points skiers have.
From that first survey I could see some interesting results (81 responses):
- 54,8% give up going skiing because they don’t have mates.
- 90% end up separating during the ski day due to different levels between mates.
- 45,9% do not attend Après Ski (after skiing) events because they do not know the activities.
- The most valorated aspects of skiing in group are: have someone to talk to and the security.
After see this interesting results, I began to have a little idea about what path take. I made a more deep interview to some skiers to verify the results and take more data. Here are some aspects that they told me (6 interviews):
- If I don’t go with anyone, I get more scared.
- What I like about ski trips is that I meet a lot of new people.
- One day I don’t mind skiing alone, but not for more days.
- My friends have more level than me and I always end up skiing alone and so bored.
All of that points take me to think about the skiers need of interacting with other people to share their hobbie, like occurs in other sports. With that in mind, I began to build the first Lean UX of the project.
In this way, the problem statement looked like this:
“Some users give up skiing because they don’t have mates to share the experience with”
In that point of the project I was thinking in two scenarios:
- Before reaching the ski slopes because there is no one to share the journey with.
- On the slopes for not skiing with people of the same level and ending up alone.
Without ruling out either of these two cases, I did a first brainstorming to start outlining some solutions.
At this point the project was moving towards a kind of network to connect users (for anuncing or joining ski trips like BlaBlaCar or for meeting people on the slopes), so I did a little research on the market to see if there was already a similar service that I could be inspired by. I found some apps that, althoug were not aimed at the world of skiing, their functionality was connecting travellers.
Finally I decided to abandonate the idea of the ski trips and concetrate the MVP (minimum valuable product) only in the activities inside the ski slopes, because of that was the most important pain point. I considered two aspects for connecting skiers:
- Groups for skiing
- Activities Après Ski
How SkiMate is gonna help users?
I was very motivated with the results of my investigation. I thought that my product was a really cool thing but…How will help my users? Well, I have to confess that my ideal user was so close to me: my mum! my mother no longer comes to ski with us because she gets very bored alone, so my user persona, journey and scenario are 100% true:
UX Design
Defining the solution
The time of UX Design has come. For me is easier to start with a MoSCoW to identify what aspect I’m gonna show and what I’m gonna dismiss, although the final solution is not very defined in my mind.
The next natural step for me is making a crazy 8 (I hate and love Crazy 8 🙃) because it helps to capture my first ideas quickly and without filters. By this way, I create a base to continue building in the following stages. Sorry for my drawings but my brain goes quicker than my hand by the moment:
This Crazy 8 has been very influenced by my competitive analysis, but I will explain this better later.
I could began to build the sitemap. I used a Card Sorting for verifying that my ideas had sense for users and thanks to this I had to make some iterations from my first proposal:
After having the sitemap defined, I used the User Journey and Scenario to try to imaginate the path that my user will follow into SkiMate for guiding me in the low-fidelity creation.
Due to thinking about this first user flow, I found some experience problems like how indicate to the app that my user is alone and wants to get some mates. I was thinking about a kind of selector that, when activated, show in a map all the skiers that have this option activated too, but this implicated that the user had to remind to desactivate the selector everytime she/he finds a mate and this could be a little bit confusing and useless.
In this second version, I thought about eliminating the selector and adding to the home menu the option “Searching mate”, that will take the user to a map where all the skiers who have entered to that option will appears. Finally this user flow changed because of I found some problems like the ubication of the skiers (always mooving) or how make the skiers meet in an eficient way because they are not always looking to the smartphone.
Finally, I found a more coherent way of finding a ski mate: the users could create “teams” (with a meetign point and time) and other skiers can join this teams. When the hour of leaving has passed, the team will disappear from the map automatically. Everyone can create his/her own team and the app will notificate her/his if someone decide to join the team. Moreover, this allows creating larger teams and indicating a meeting point in a clearly way
Low and Mid-Fidelity
When designing an user experience, I always try to be inspired by existing product, adpating the things that I see more interesting and useful. In that project I have made it too.
UI Design
Let’s play!
For that project I wanted to make a really dinamyc app. For that reason, I decide to design in a Material way (for first time in my UI/UX design path). I chose Material for its flexibility and the use of a lot of colors and illustrations.
Searching for inspiration, I found on Pinterest an illustration with the vibes that I was looking for giving to my app, so I decided to use it like a kind of moodboard for testing with some users:
The results were very positive: users perceived this style like “energetic”, “fun” and “active”, so I decided to adopt this colors for trying to keep the essence also in my app. I thought about making some illustrations for giving more personality to my project. The original idea was change these illustrations according to the weather to give them not only and esthetic function, but also some inmersive experience, taking advantage of all the resources that material gives us.
Some brand design
Logos and names are not my strong point. However, I was really into trying to create an image for representing my app, although in a basic way. Let’s start with the name. Very easy explanation: Ski + Mate 🙃 . Easy to pronounce, easy to connect with the app use.
For the logo, I was thinking about how represent the friendship between skiers, the fun of rolling the slopes together:
For the typography I used a Google font: Mulish. I thought that was a really fun typography. The final result:
SkiMate is ready to go!
In this user flow, our user Rosa enters SkiMate to find someone with whom share the slopes. When she realizes that there is not any team that suits her, decides to create her own team. Soon he receives a request from Juan.
Searching for a team:
Craeting a new team:
Receiving a petition:
Bonus: Ilustrations adaptable to weather
It is also important to see how all this screens interact together:
A long way in a short time
Well, SkiMate has come to end and I’m very proud of what I have got in only 2 weeks. I really like the style of the app and I have had so much fun working in Material for first time. In a future, I would like to develop also the “events” part and create more different illustrations for the home screen.
I have learned a lot of that second individual project of my career. The most important think I have leraned: to iterate, iterate and iterate.
so if you have read this far…THANK YOU! I am still learning so if you have any question, suggestion or comment I will be so happy to hear from you!
✉️ viviserranovivi@gmail.com
