Overview

Adidas needed a dedicated mobile destination to cover all things football. This experience needed to support seasonal campaigns and build long-term engagement with ‘football creators’. In just three weeks we ideated, designed and developed a native iOS proof of concept.

My contribution

Strategy User research Product design

The team

1 × design director 1 × project manager 1 × strategist 4 × designers 2 × engineers

Year

2017

A look at the app experience we designed for Adidas

Research

Collaborating across two offices

For this project we were working across two offices. A small team in London and Manchester. We had a short timeline — just three weeks to turn around a proof of concept. So it was crucial we had strong processes between the two teams.

Exploring the problem space

We kicked off the project as a whole team and discussed how to approach the work. We found a balance between whole team sessions and smaller team sessions worked well for us. Which meant we were in sync with the other team — but also had clear blocks of time to make progress.

Both teams followed a similar design process — but explored the problem space on their own. We regrouped at the end of each day to align our direction. We used the value proposition framework to explore the customer needs and painpoints. Then crazy eights to generate lots of ideas quickly off the back of the value proposition framework.

The target customer was what adidas calls the football creator. They are the top of the pyramid and have a high influence over their peers. We built a concept around the idea of growth for creators. A hub to support their football dreams and resources to equip them for life.

Four core flows

We broke the app experience down into four key stages. The onboarding, your feed, challenges & meetups, and Tango League — which is a global football tournament from adidas. I led the design for the feed and the Tango League section. Whilst a designer in Manchester tackled the onboarding and the challenges section. We worked with a remote iOS engineer to build a working prototype. The idea was to demonstrate the core flows for each of the four stages we defined.

Crazy 8’s for rapid concept generation
Going through the brief and writing notes and ideas
Mapping out customer needs with the value proposition framework
A service map to understand the full adidas ecosystem
The adidas experience screens broken down into 4 key moments
The onboarding, feed, and challenge screen

Takeaway

After three weeks the outcome was a polished and functioning native mobile app. The prototype demonstrated the core thinking of our concept. In the end we didn't win the piece of work. Still, there was a lot of learnings to be taken from the work. Like how to run effective collaborative processes across multiple offices and delving deeper into native app design.

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