Designing one app for four kinds of sports club user

What is MyClub?

No all-in-one tool for sports club management existed. Club officials, coaches, players and parents of child players each have their own problems with taking part in a sports club. MyClub addresses the communication, event organization, social and statistics side of it through a mobile app.

Four kinds of user, one app

The design started with user research. We interviewed the people the app was for: club owners and officials, coaches, players and the parents of young players, from football and other sports clubs. The decisions below come from what they told us.

The interesting design problem was that the four audiences want different things from the same data. A coach wants attendance to plan training. A parent wants to know where to be and when. A player wants their own statistics. An official wants the club to run.

The answer wasn’t four apps, and not one app with a settings screen full of toggles. It was a single shared structure where what you see is filtered by the role you hold in the club.

The app opens on a club feed that everyone shares, with results, announcements and photos, because the one thing all four groups have in common is wanting to know what is happening. Underneath that sits a five-part structure: feed, calendar, messages, club and profile. A coach and a parent see the same five sections; what fills them differs.

Statistics were the clearest case. A player wants their own numbers. A coach wants the squad’s. A parent wants their child’s. One profile serves all three, with tabs for overview, statistics, media and settings, and the role decides whose profile you’re looking at and what you can edit.

The feed also had to carry sponsor and advertiser posts alongside club ones, since that is how a free club tool pays for itself. Those needed to be clearly marked without making the feed feel like an ad space, which is a design problem more than a technical one.

What we designed

The full interface: information architecture across the five sections, every screen and state, the navigation model and an interactive prototype covering the main journeys for each of the four roles. Components were built as a reusable set so the product could grow without the design drifting.

Status

MyClub was designed as a product concept and taken through to a complete, prototyped interface. The promotional site we built alongside it collected sign-ups ahead of a launch.