Narrowing the App’s Focus
With the bulk of my research around my scorebook managing app complete, I can start getting into the nitty gritty of the app. This means i can start getting a clearer understanding of my future users, as well as decide what the features and navigation of the app will be.
Diversifying my user base
When creating an app, the first instinct is to view the problems and solutions of the app through a lense of your own. The issue though is that you're going to have a near infinite amount of different users who all have different concerns, wants and needs, many that won't line up with your own. Some may struggle with technology and want a simple app, others may desire a very complex app with a bunch of different features they can sink their teeth into. This is something crucial to recognize when creating personas for potential users of your app.
As said by Ste Geiner in his post about diverse personas, it goes beyond simply making random people and rather taking in a multitude of different factors to make sure your personas touch on all the different users.
Ask yourself these questions as you create or update the personas you use to think about your product.
Do they represent a diverse set of users? Are their attributes (needs, goals, assumptions, etc.) based on quantitatively significant research data? Have you made generalizations based on age, race, gender, or sexual preference? Do you employ personas that are different from your own experience and biases? If you use stock photography for your personas, have you chosen photography that does not perpetuate stereotypes?
Creating my Persona's
When beginning to create my Persona's, I tried to use as many of these factors as possible. As shown in my user interviews, the age group of this app can vary greatly, so I tried to include as many different age groups as I could. Beyond that, when researching other similar apps to this, I found a large user set of parents and grandparents that would use an app like this to track and keep up with their children's little league games.
An example of the format I used as for my Persona's
With all these different user bases in mind, I began creating my personas with the goal to address these types of users. This meant having one that would be an older adult wanted to share their experiences with someone, similar to what Kevin said in his user interview, as well as someone more new to scorekeeping and wants to find a way to get into it, similar to Eamonn. Beyond that, I also tried to use the experiences and reviews of my competition to create personas that wanted to use it for their little league experiences. Overall, I ended up with five different personas to touch on all these users.
Figuring out the features of the app
With the vast majority of research now on the back-burner, I could finally use it to help determine what features would be in this app, as well as how it would be structured. To start, I placed in the core features of the app that I knew had to be there. This meant the physical scorecard itself, as well as settings and a way to view the full collection of cards.
When expanding the app beyond this, I tried recalling what seemed most frequent with my research. This ended with me coming up with a type of community feature. A common theme among keeping score is that it goes simply beyond keeping the score itself, but rather the experience and how it can be shared with others. To address this, I added a set of screens that would allow people to search through and share all different kinds of scorecards. This included making different group subsets for different types of leagues, as well as a way to search for specific games in case it could bring a very interesting looking card. Overall, my final information architecture included about 20 screens of features with potential room for more
