social sports app

Filled with uncertainties ft. my first ever product role.

Splink was originally conceived in a startup programme called NTUitive. It was brimming with potential yet riddled with many uncertainties—market acceptance, user adoption, and technical feasibility were all unknowns.

The founder reached out and offered me a product design role after learning about my search for a design opportunity. Despite my lack of prior experience, he gave me an unforgettable chance to prove myself in the field.

Like going on a date, it is tedious and nerve-wrecking.

All the ways players currently use to play sports.

It was critical to first understand how sports enthusiasts find sports partners to play sports—including the channels, their user journey, and friction points.

Constant jams and documenting to establish alignment.

As a small and lean team, we had the advantage of frequent, dynamic discussions to share updates on our findings and align on priorities. This approach also enabled us to extensively coordinate and flash out our startup roadmap.

Create and browse activity with ease.

The purpose of Splink was to make it easy for users to find and join sports activities, so we focused on optimising the user experience for creating and browsing these activities.

Collaborating with the team, I explored various design options, balancing constraints and making thoughtful trade-offs to achieve the best results.

Constant and rapid usability tests with users.

We conducted frequent rapid usability tests with beta users to gather immediate feedback, which helped us to quickly test the viability of certain ideas.

For one, we discovered that users in the older age bracket struggled to understand how Match Make work. This led us to implement the Activity Posting first.

Documenting designs for developer handoff.

Prior to feature development, our team would often schedule online demos where I walk the engineers through the designs, followed by a brief Q&A session.

Keeping in mind of our time zone difference, and that details coverage can be brief during meetings, I still meticulously documented the designs with detailed annotations, and interactive prototypes when needed.

Anything to reduce the margin of error!

A new way to engage with Splink and boosting user retention.

With a growing community of business partners, we've decided to gamify the activity exploration experience by introducing campaigns and activity points system.

Apart from activities, users will be able to also discover and participate in exciting new campaigns, stay active, and get rewarded - which helps to boost the engagement in our app.

Clubs for users looking to organise and play frequently.

As we onboard more sports interest groups onto our platform, we noticed an increase in demand of group organisation. As such, we've decided to launch a way for these groups to better utilise our platform to address their needs with Clubs.

Clubs enhances group coordination and engagement, empowering groups to organise and participate in sports activities regularly and efficiently.

Marketing and design system initiatives.

Next in line to also launch was Sport Light, a monthly sports rotation designed to boost activity and awareness in specific sports, accompanied by campaigns and rewards for users.

Additionally, I also laid the foundation for Splink's early design system, Ignite, in an attempt to create cohesive and efficiency in our design language across the app and web ecosystem as the app begins to scale.

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