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I looked everywhere in my contacts, and I couldn’t find a friend to call out and play tennis with…

Have you ever encountered a situation like this? You finally settled down to a relaxing weekend afternoon and wanted to schedule an exhilarating tennis game with friends, but you can’t seem to find the right person who has time to play with you and matches your level.

Then you came across Recess… The ultimate sport-gathering app for players to matchmake to sportmates around them and enjoy a good game, as competitive as they want.

Product Designing for Matchmaking

As the lead designer for the Matchmaking feature, which is the main function of this startup app, I went through the process of user research, defining the problem, ideation, iteration, and prototyping in a meticulous manner.

Understanding the User Problems

After interviewing 25 individuals in college communities with their intake on gathering for sports events during their leisure times, I discovered that:

<aside> 1️⃣ Users struggle to find a time that works for all friends to play together. Miscommunications happen when the game is big and users need to confirm time with multiple groups of people.

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<aside> 2️⃣ Users find it difficult to acquire players who have good sportsmanship and share the same interests and level of skill in a particular sport.

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<aside> 3️⃣ Users may feel intimidated or uncomfortable when approaching others to join a sports event or group.

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Low-Fidelity Prototype

With these user problems defined, I had a quality brainstorming session with my teammates and came up with some solid ideas.

After iterating through multiple versions of low-fidelity flows, making changes here and there with feedbacks from our product managers engineers, I finally arrived at the following prototype:

Medium-Fidelity Prototype

First Draft of Mid-Fi Flow

Final Draft of Mid-Fi Flow

High**-Fidelity** Prototype

The final high-fidelity was born after a few months of revisions and communications with other designers, the frontend, and backend team. I encountered some challenges throughout this process such as missing flows for edge cases within the Matchmaking process or the MVP plan being updated with adding/deleting sub-features.