TAC app
Project
Roles
Duration
- Mobile app
- Research
- Product Design
- 2 weeks
A mobile app to manage a fishing tournament
and track contest results and rankings
for organizers and participants.
Context
In February 2021, Truite Area Cup was acquired by FishingTheSpot with the objective to make it a staple of the fishing contest industry.
A website was being built to promote the contest, its regulations and sponsors. But we also wanted to change the way it was run. And with limited time since the project started in March and the new season was set to start mid-April. We couldn't miss this deadline because changing the way a season long contest is ran in the middle of it can be challenging.
Opportunities
The contest was managed the old school way with pen and paper. This caused idle time during rounds and made it difficult to referee the many duels happening at the same time.
Participants had no way to keep track of their ranking in the tournament. It was impossible for them to see the results of a selected date, scores, winners and future events to come.
Team & Role
The team consisted of a back-end developer, a front-end dev and myself as the product designer.
I oversaw the entire design of the app from initial ideas stage to development including research, ideation, information architecture, user flows and UI design.
Results
Time saved per event
87 min
Events attended per participant
+84%
Design process
Given the limited time, I spoke directly with judges on site, during events formats testing, to understand their pain points and needs.
During the user research phase, shadowing allowed me to discover the following insights:
- Judges are overly asked for directions on site by contestants who don't know where to go ;
- Judges can't keep track of rounds other than theirs to referee making it hard for them to synchronize.
- Contestants find themselves waiting around a lot.
- Participants would like to have access to scores, future battles and rankings.
User flow
I created this user flow to helps us scope the project and lay down the app's foundations. The main challenge we encountered was to keep things really simple while having three different types of users: judges, contestants and followers.
The deadline being short, we decided to have various versions of the same interface depending on the user type and event state.
Design system
I created a basic design system to move faster and ensure continuity and logic between the website and the app.
Main pages
To keep the navigation simple, the app has only three main pages, being the competition list, global ranking and user profile.
Booking a date
I designed a quick and simple way for users to see planned and on-going contests. When a future event is open, users can view all the registered participants, allowing for rivalries to emerge. They also can book their place and pay directly through the app.
Live contest
When a contest is on-going, users can follow the results live. The different pages are unlocked when the corresponding stage starts, so that participants can follow the competition easily.
As participants, users can easily spot themselves thanks to a subtle background. They are also guided all through the qualification stage with directions on which physical location to go to.
Final ranking
Once a competition is over, a new tab appears with the final results. The users can also go back and see the course of previous stages and rounds.
Judge's interface
When a contest begins, the duels are randomized with each judge assigned to a location. The duels are then added to his queue for each round. After testing 6 different layouts for the judging interface, we chose to show a split screen with easy-to-manage live scoring.
We designed the interface to ensure that the course of the competition is not hampered by potential errors. Judges can add and remove points, start, pause or end the duel, and grant additionnal time to it (1 to 5 minutes). When a duel is over, points can be modified before saving the final result and the duel itself can be restarted if needed.
