Project Details

Case
Design Sprint

Duration
2 weeks

Focus
User Centered Design

Shinner is a Swedish app developed by and for skaters, with the ambition to become the world's leading social skating app.

Currently the product's main focus lies on uploading and browsing new spots, and it has 1000+ users. Lately the team behind Shinner has faced difficulty maintaining a retention rate - the majority of their users doesn't find their way back again after the first visit. This resulted in a user centered design sprint with the goal to find features that make Shinners users want to return to the app - time after time.

The project was planned in 4 parts - Discover, Define, Sketch and Test - which resulted in a hi-fi prototype for Shinner to use for future iterations.

Discover

01 Expert Interview
To get an objective view of my users, I interviewed a member of the Gothenburg Skateboard Association, to learn about the skateboard culture in a broader perspecive. I gained knowledge about what it is like to be a beginner as well as a professional, and we discussed skateboarding from an inclusive perspective.

02 User Interviews & Testing
I interviewed a total of 5 active skaters who all were involved in the skateboarding community. The purpose of the interviews, in addition to testing the existing app, was to collect qualitative data about what skating means to them, and to find common denominators. I used the data I obtained from the interviews to create 3 different personas.

03 Competitive Analysis
Since there are several competing apps with similar core features, I chose to compare and analyze their strengths and weaknesses to find dos and don’ts for the sketching phase.

The best thing about skating is that you can skate when and where you want, in the way you feel at the moment. There are no rules, unlike other sports. I've always been kinda introverted, but I always felt that I can be myself in the skate community, and it's easy to make new friends.
Tester, 16

Prototype & Evaluation

The sketch phase resulted in a semi-interactive prototype where I restructured the navigation by prioritizing the most relevant features based on the data I obtained. I focused on the endowment effect – to encourage the user to contribute to the community and give them opportunities to easily share spots, clips, and live streams.

The feedback I got from the evaluation phase was overall good: Testers who earlier said that they usually rarely ever upload skate content on social media themselves felt encouraged to do so here since it's a rather closed community.

In future iterations, it would be interesting to research the opportunity to share and upload events and happenings, but since this wasn't a prioritized feature of the users I talked to, I left it out at this stage.

Full XD Prototype

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