Culdesac
Culdesac is a platform for sports fans to congregate, discuss, and produce quality journalistic sports content.
- Client
- Culdesac
- Product
- iOS, Android App
- Industry
- Sports
- Vertical
- Social, Journalism
- Headquarters
- Los Angles, CA
- Company Size
- 1-10
Key services
UI Design, UX design, Brand Design, Feature Mapping, Information Architecture
About Culdesac
Sports fans are opinionated—they love to debate about the teams and athletes they follow. However, there’s no platform dedicated to constructively enabling those conversations.
Culdesac aims to put the power back in the hands of sports fans. Now, fans can congregate, debate, and produce quality journalistic content about their athletes, teams, and games—in a constructive, unfiltered, article-based medium.
unfiltered, article-based medium. Culdesac wanted to help users create a portfolio of sports-oriented written work with which they could build a following. They make it easy for non-journalists to create sports content, helping fans feel they have a voice and are part of a community. Culdesac has transformed the online conversation around sports; instead of being between a few TV announcers, it’s now like a bar conversation with friends.
Product Goals
- UX/UI Audit of existing designs
- Redesign of existing application
- Being ready to launch on the App Store
- Drive user adoption of the app’s UX/UI redesign
The Process
Discovery
- Previous Research Review
- Stakeholder Workshop
- Competitive Analysis
- Project Brief
- MVP Feature Set
UX Audit and Heuristic Evaluation, which revealed: lack of hierarchy and organization in the debate page structure; poor use of color to create meaning; no clear way to begin writing a debate; lack of icon clarity; poor use of typography; lack of functionality features; incorrect screen sequence.
Design
- Site Mapping
- MVP Design
- High-Fidelity Wireframes
- UI Exploration
- Low-Fidelity Wireframes
DELIVERABLES
- Heuristic Evaluation
- UX Audit
- Competitive Analysis
- UI Exploration
- Information Architecture
- High-Fidelity Wireframe
The Impacts
- Following our UX audit, our client expressed relief: Goji Labs was able to see the design flaws Culdesac knew were there but didn’t have the technical language to articulate.
- Our clients appreciated that the results of our competitive analysis highlighted the content creation mechanism of different apps to draw inspiration for a sports-centric audience.
- When we submitted different iterations of the design for revision, the client was excited to see that our designs reflected the best parts of social media, while baking in unique features. We successfully created the fun, irreverent approach to sports debate that our clients wanted.
The Challenges
- Creating a design system on the back of an existing prototype. We were constrained by some of the design decisions made by the previous team. That limited our UI exploration, and our design system became a sort of mix between artifacts from the previous product and our own elements and icons.
- Balancing a need for enough screens in the wireframe to adequately illustrate and flesh out a working product, while also keeping it to the minimum basic features the app would require for a first release.
The Insights
We kept in mind that our clients had already been through the design process and likely to be a little drained and skeptical.
So early on, we established a culture of open communication and collaboration. We encouraged our clients to be as open as possible with us and express any reservations early. We also worked to make the process as smooth as possible by listening carefully to what they asked and keeping them in the loop at every step.
We made sure they were heard and reflected their inputs in our deliverables so that they didn’t have to repeat themselves or experience the frustration of not getting a viable product again.
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