An Easy Way to Stay Up to Date in the Amateur Sports World
Featured by Apple
In partnership with the great team at Eyeball Inc, MindSea developed an innovative app for amateur sports fans and players on iPhone. This case study describes how we worked together and what we accomplished.
Eyeball’s Vision
To build a scalable community of users by making it easy and fun to share amateur sports scores, highlights, and updates with friends and family over the Eyeball app, along with major social networks.
The Challenge: Creating a Great User Experience for Amateur Sports Fans
The initial stages of creating Eyeball’s user experience began with both teams asking some important questions:
- “How can we create a convenient mobile service for athletes and fans who want to keep up with their friends and family’s sports games?” We wanted people to feel immersed in the game, even if they weren’t present.
- “How can we make keeping score as easy as possible, so people who are scoring can still enjoy the game?”
- “How can we encourage our audience to use the app, to share it with others, and to create a better awareness of the amateur sports community?”
These questions helped us clarify the core requirements.
A considerable amount of time was spent sketching, wireframing, visualizing and testing how people would use every aspect of the app. We worked closely with the Eyeball team to develop a user experience that would delight users while keeping and sharing the score of their friend’s games. On the other side, we wanted to create an immersive experience for remote users following the game through live scoreboards and photo updates.
The Approach
It was evident that Eyeball’s unique vision would require an experienced team to collaborate, design, and deliver an app for iOS. Since the Eyeball team was focused on developing the Android version of the app, they needed a strong iOS team to work with them side-by-side. This was important to ensure brand consistency and a high-level of polish throughout the apps while staying true to each platform’s conventions.
Design
“The best thing about the MindSea design process is its flexibility: in our case, we had our own design resources. Often when you place different design groups together on a project things do not always run smoothly. In our experience, however, our relationship with the MindSea team allowed us to utilize the design resources from both teams in an effective way.”
– Joel Steele, Product Designer, Eyeball Inc.
We used our iterative design and development process to focus on the essential features, without trying to lock down all requirements up front. Every Monday, we would have a sync meeting with the Eyeball team to make sure each of us were always on the same page with development and design. Because we were designing the iOS version of the app and the Eyeball team was creating the Android version, having constant communication between designers and developers from both parties was a key component in keeping the balance of a consistent eyeball brand while staying true to platform conventions on Android and iOS. This weekly practice saved a lot of time by keeping our teams aligned on the right priorities.
“The weekly meetings provided a really valuable communication foundation for our project; Topics consistently stayed on point with a goal of getting the job done and minimizing time waste. This was so important for us, as we always straddled with competing priorities and distractions. Having confidence that the MindSea team was focused on solving the problems we set in front of them was very important to us.”
– Shaun Johansen, CTO, Eyeball Inc.
The Results
Shortly after launching Eyeball had a 5 star rating in the App Store, and was featured by Apple as Best New App in the Sports category. The app includes live scoreboards that update automatically when a person makes a change to their scoreboard. It also includes a timeline where friends can share photos and updates from games they are watching, and to cheer on their teams. Users have their own profiles that showcase their activity through scoreboards, posts, posts they are tagged in, and photos.
“We’re very happy with the results of our V1 application. The MindSea team delivered exactly what we asked, and on time. When we needed to deviate from the original plan, MindSea let us know and opened a dialog to discuss and make sure everybody was in sync. In the end, a high quality and very scalable product was produced.” – Jay Steele, CEO, Eyeball Inc.
The Experience
“We originally signed on to work with MindSea because we heard they were a high caliber team with a collaborative attitude and work ethos. They did not disappoint. We cannot imagine having worked with anybody else on this project.”
– Jay Steele, CEO, Eyeball Inc.
At the end of the process, both teams were happy and excited to release version 1 of the Eyeball Sports Scoreboard. We look forward to our continued collaboration with the Eyeball team and are excited to watch the app’s user base grow.
