With Pickup, we are trying to allow users to find people anywhere in the world and near them to play games at any given moment. You can imagine a world in which you Pickup your phone and in an instant you can go to a soccer game. This is the power of pickup, we do not see any huge competitors in this market and yet it is something most people would want out of a product.
While researching for Pickup, We analyzed and performed a variety of different research methods to understand better; who our core audience is and what they want to see from us. Starting with Competitive Analysis, this was most impactful to the beginning stages of our product. We looked at the top-performing apps in the same space as our own and used their apps. This is primarily used to gain a better understanding of how their market works and how can we stand out. Also used it for determining strengths and weaknesses, understanding market trends, and how to create something unique. Each of our competitors were evaluated on a couple of key features: Price, Audience, and Quality.
After we understood our place in the market we wanted to discover who our primary audience would be and what they would want from us. This leads us to our next research method which is creating User Stories. Creating user stories entails two things, one would be identifying a unique persona, with a name, age, job, etc and the other would be their scenario. Which is a situation our persona is dealing with or is put into. We created about a dozen or so User Stories all with diverse backgrounds and scenarios. An example of one was someone who found themselves to be quite lonely having moved into a new city but with a deep passion for soccer. Which is a perfect user story for our app. When creating our user stories we were looking for 3 key things: What could they gain from our app? How would they find out about it? Would it work for them?
Last but not least badum tsss. We performed a Heuristic Evaluation on our top competitor in the space. Our top competitor was an app called GOODREC, they are a multi-sports pickup game finder for major cities. Once we had our target, we took the 10 Biometrics and evaluated each one on a scale of one through ten. This entailed us going through most of the features of the app for the nitty gritty things. This is a huge step forward regarding the UX experience because it gives us clear markers to evaluate our competitors. What this means is that we can find these and improve upon them in our product. Lastly, we gave them a final ranking out of 100 determining their total score for our evaluation.
In conclusion, we found out that our competitor suffered from a factually clanky UI and a program that did not feel good to use. Which lead us down a road to Aesthetics becoming a top priority when it came to researching and will continue to be. Most users will drop an app pretty fast if it does not look good or feel good. From the heuristic Evaluation we did, we can conclude that our top competitor can be wiped out with a couple of simple fixes to UI and nothing major on the backend. Finally, from the user stories we concluded that the 18-30 year range would be our target audience, and it would be those who have either recently moved, or are looking for a place to meet new people. These would be the two driving factors in our customer base and would help drive app downloads. If we can just promote Clean Aesthetics, decent UI and easy way to meet new people; Then I think we will have a hit! Definitely need more user testing and feedback which would be nice. But our Minimum Viable Product is becoming clearer.