Angling With Friends
Summary: AWF is a web-based fishing application that provides a simple method for friends to compete in a tournament without the hassle and mortality danger of keeping fish in a live-well. Just catch, weigh, document, and release.
My Role
Research and UX Design
For this project, I was approached by a friend and fellow angler to help design an app to use for our fun tournaments. To accept the challenge, I insisted on conducting research to inform the decisions we would make. My plans included:
Primary Research Goals
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Understand kayak and boating tournament needs/differences
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How common is the "friend" tournament; is there a greater need than our circle?
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What ancillary tournament-day needs exist
Primary Interaction Design Goals
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Simple create, register and share of tournaments
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Quick and easy logging of catches
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Live leaderboard and big fish updates without refresh
Challenge
Provide a fun, live scoreboard for friends to have a casual fishing tournament. Existing apps have several drawbacks including registration, cost, participant limits and general ease of use. AWF strives to solve these issues and more. A working, coded beta version existed prior to my involvement.
My Process
Empathize
User Interviews
Using different kayak, boat and fishing-related forums on Facebook (to which I already belonged), I reached out to these groups carefully, asking for 5 minutes to share their fishing style. I created a screener using Google Forms to identify anglers for our target persona. Within a few days I had eight responses, five of which agreed to a follow-up discussion in exchange for a free voucher for the app upon its release.
Key Insights:
As a fisherman myself for many years and working with another long-time angler, I was reminded of what I already knew: We are NOT the user. From our responses, we gained incredible insight into how others conduct their tournaments.
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Measurement Styles
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While most bass tournaments measure by weight, measuring by length does happen with a twist - lengths are "converted" to weight. Furthermore, kayak tournaments use length exclusively. Regardless of style, most struggled with how to report and organize this data.
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Measuring and photographing a fish in a kayak results in many lost fish.
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Fair Play Implementations
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Few people rely on the honor system. Many have systems in place to keep people honest, such as taking photos with a unique ID item (wristband, etc.) given that day. Others use 2-per boat to validate, even requiring a single boater to go to another boater to verify.
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Species-specific rules
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Most bass tournaments give no points to anything but bass. Some use unique rules for alternate species, such as points for the largest and smallest non-target fish.
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Stakeholder Interviews
While I always schedule structured stakeholder interviews for larger projects, this was more of an ongoing, but casual conversation with the creator/developer of the app.
Key Insights:
As a boat tournament fisherman, in the same local club for many years, the creator of this app had little insight into how the rest of the fishing community did their tournaments. In light of some early discussion around things I had learned, he was quite open to finding out how others handle similar situations.
Competitive Analysis
The two most popular competitors in this space are Fish Donkey and TourneyX. A Google search turned up a number of other options. After review of several against our high level goals, I added iCatch to the list to review.
Artifacts
Define
Personas
Personas for this tournament were created in concept, but not in practice. The various asks, as laid out in the journey map, were split between tournament director and angler. A third persona (fan) also gets discussed, but no artifacts were made for this project.
Journey Map
After discussions with five different anglers, I created a combined journey map of the current, pre-AWF condition. Journey maps take on all different shapes and sizes for me, depending on the project. In this case, one map to cover the various differences in workflows was enough.
Key Insights:
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Looking at the order of operations at a tournament helped to quickly find new opportunities we hadn't thought about. Most of the important comments were collected and organized by time and phase.
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At the ramp, post tournament, was the most compelling view with multiple items shown as "thumbs down".
Wireframing
I created zero wireframes, as the UI design was presented early by the creator/developer, already in code.
Artifacts
Ideate
Generating Creative Ideas
The creator of the app was continuing to put ideas into code. Areas for additions or innovation were where I focused.
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Statement Starter: "How Might We...allow anglers to get their line back into the water as quickly as possible?"
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A Slack conversation ensued over this idea. Each of the competitive products I reviewed had a very fatal flaw, which was a cumbersome record/log process. I suggested we remove most of the "confirmations" that existed in the app presented to me. Entries could be edited and deleted, so a simple toast was proposed as affordance that an entry was made.
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Prototype
Low-fi Clickable
Zip. Nada. All content was pushed directly to the app as concepts evolved! Not actually a bad thing in this case.
Heuristic Review
Completed this near the end of this particular project. Of course, the design process is never linear!
Test
Usability Test
This was really a combination of usability testing and contextual inquiry. I fished (for fun) with different friends during the summer. To serve as the "test cases", I asked them to log their catches as if in a tournament. I observed and worked as a boat partner (typical) in the process. This provided the most realistic environmental and situational test possible. Throughout the summer, we had all different types of days, from rainy to blue bird skies.
Key Insights:
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The default phone keyboard entry is insufficient for logging catches. Imagine bringing up your phone's keyboard when dialing a phone number. The digits exist and, therefore, can be dialed, but it's challenging.
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The default sorting was based on weight. Most anglers wanted to see it based on time, as that is often more relevant when you want to review the day's catches.
"It is far more important for me to know what time I caught each fish. I will remember the techniques and where I was during the morning, so ordering them based on time gives me all the information I need." -Vic
Revisions
A revision list has been ongoing and implemented along the way. Much of the UI design remains the same from the dev/creator - he did a nice job IMHO. The main items arising from my research and testing:
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Add oversized, phone-style buttons for weight entry, bypassing the keyboard
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Sort by time as a default; Sortable columns as a nice to have
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Heuristic Review changes
Enhancement Requests
Plenty of enhancement requests came from the interview stage. For now, it is a web-app, limiting some functionality (such as notifications) until a true app is created.