In collaboration with BrainStation, I participated in a hackathon for ALT.xyz, a sports card investing company from San Francisco. The objective of the hackathon was to help raise awarness in sports trading catds as an investing opportunity, and boost awareness in ALT's platform. On the team of 6 which included two developers, two data scientists, and two product designers (myself included), we presented our solution within 3 days, winning 1st place out of 15 others for our innovative web feature for ALT. Our novel community web feature would successfully increase user engagement, brand awareness outside of the platform, and increase revenue.
Company:
ALT.xyz
My Role:
Product Designer
Year:
2022
Work Done:
UX Research, Competitive Research, Web Design
Where is the investing community?
Given ALT’s problem statement;
“How might we build awareness and understanding of trading sports cards as an alternative investment opportunity?”
Our team raised (2) potential problems with their existing web and mobile platforms:
Lack of Awareness in ALT and sports card trading among young and middle aged adults.
Lack of Community aspect, with no ability to share cards, profiles, or posts.
Process
Our multidisciplinary team, comprising of data scientists, designers, and developers, met in the initial planning stage to devise an action plan for ALT's problem statement. Initially, the absence of a structured process led to a flurry of ideas, hindering our ability to formulate a coherent plan. To address this, the other designer and I delineated a step-by-step approach, assigning specific team members to each phase ensured a sequential progression akin to a relay race. The following outlines how we completed each step within just 1 week:
Gather Data: Data scientists conducted market and user research for general sports fans, sports card investors, and ALT's user's to understand the primary customer base. They discovered that males were more avid fans of sports than females, and that younger men are bigger fans of basketball, vs older men are bigger fans of baseball.
User Research: We interviewed participants aged 20-35 years old who had experience with investing on their motivations, challenges, and behaviours (see questions here). We discovered these three key insights:
Lack of Trust - due to its niche nature, typical investors are not aware of sports cards as an investing opportunity. They have some doubts about where cards are stored, and how to monitor their value.
Lack of Community - Existing communities or groups are limited and some are exclusive, hence not accessible to the public. Without community it is more difficult for current or potential investors to build trust and ownership in the world of sports card investing.
Avoidance of High Risk - Participants view sports card investing as high risk due to it’s innate volatility.
Based on these insights we revised our original HMW statement to:
"How might we raise awareness towards sports cards as an investment opportunity and establish a sense of belonging and trust among users?"
Develop Persona + Task Flow: With a better understanding our of our target user and their motivations/challenges, we developed the following persona. John is a young professional who is results-driven, avoids risk, and has a desire to feel secure in his investing decisions through communities or other's online posts.
Due to the time constraint, our team developed the solution up until the posted comment. Here is John's task flow in ALT's web platform:
Wireframing and Prototyping: Initially, we began ideating the task flow screens for ALT's mobile platform. However, after discovering from our developers that they were better versed in developing for web instead of mobile, we pivoted to designing wireframes for ALT's web platform based off the mobile wireframes we created. Although a bump in the road, we understood this was more feasible for our team and would help us get to the building phase faster.
Hi-Fidelity Mockups and Branding: Due to the time constraint, we did not have time or resources to gather user feedback to optimize wireframes user experience. We proceeded to add branding elements and injecting colour, to speed up handoff to the developers who needed to begin building our solution for presentation.
Next Steps + Future Thinking: For further improvements, our team asserted that finding more survey data specifically from the sports card investing community would help to gain additional insight into user’s pain-points and motivations. Also having user’s input their data upon registering an account to allow for customer segmentation. In this context, the user data would be used to show suggested cards (i.e, a recommender system) that are personalized to their previous purchases or behaviours, enhancing the user experience through a tailored approach.
Enhanced user trust and belonging by building an online community.
Using ALT's brand elements, our team successfully integrated a new community tab and page for ALT's online platform. User's can now create profiles, view discussion boards, add comments, and ultimately feel more trust in their investing decisions on ALT's platform. Users can also share their thoughts or recent card purchases to other social media platforms, increasing brand awareness to potentially capture new users.
Future development would include developing this community feature for ALT's mobile app, optimized for mobile.
Key Takeaways
The results of the website community feature should be highly successful in engaging more customers to convert and boost sales and subscriptions for ALT. After implementing the newly designed community feature, we would expect to see:
Increased customer engagement: successfully engage more potential customers since it would be shared outside to other platforms/social media, resulting in a significant increase in the number of page views and user engagement.
Higher conversion rates: Communicating the value proposition of ALT's platform and sports card investing to external platforms and social media would result in a significant increase in the number of conversions and subscriptions.
Improved customer retention: By raising user's trust in ALT by being able to share and communicate in the community, this would enhance the user experience and result in improved customer satisfaction, leading to increased customer retention rates.
Increased revenue: The higher conversion rates and improved customer retention would result in a significant increase in revenue for ALT.
Overall, the website feature for ALT’s platform successfully addressed the problem of raising awareness in sports cards as an investment opportunity. Ultimately, our solution would help to create a community that would build user’s trust and sense of ownership in their investments, also thereby increasing exposure to those outside of the platform.
