Overview
Here at our new start-up, we believe that sports unite people all over the world. Some argue that sports are our universal love language, and they provide a sense of community and sense of belonging for fans. However, due to COVID-19, fans and teams at all levels have been impacted by the loss of sports. Our team has identified a range of issues that exist for teams, coaches, players, and fans. The first problem is the lack of revenue for the entire sports industry due to the season postponements and cancellations, as well as the lack of revenue from advertisers who depend on those regularly scheduled games.
The losses are not limited to revenue, however, and we have seen a similar effect on the greater sports atmosphere of fan engagement. Abruptly stopping in the middle of the season is very jarring, and even when the leagues return the fans are barred from attending indefinitely. Therefore, the driving goal of our product is to recreate that sports atmosphere and rejuvenate fan engagement at a time when fans are unable to physically interact with each other.
We present My Home Court Advantage, a free sports streaming platform that brings the excitement of the game right to the comfort of your living room. This comes alongside a live chat where viewers can talk to each other or ask questions to members of the broadcasting team. The site also provides opportunities for viewers to directly engage with the broadcast through the crowd meter, personal media uploads, and a variety of giveaways. Subscribers get extra perks of their own, including exclusive chat rooms and private interviews with coaches/players
Our product provides an accessible, user-friendly medium for delivering sports content that also supplies that social interaction sports fans are longing for. We hope you enjoy it.
Team Members
Clay Spicklemire (Project Manager & Pro team member, Junior Mathematics @ Alabama):
As project manager, Clay was responsible for running the daily huddle meetings as well as the weekly coaching calls. He maintained the Trello board with a list of tasks and ensured completion of the weekly goals, and also managed this document and project submission. Clay also worked specifically with the Socket.IO live chat and the Google Login authentication aspects of the front and back end.
Vaibbavi Senthil Kumar (Pro team member, Junior in Computer Science @ Purdue University):
As a member of the pro team, Vaibbavi was responsible for working on the back end connections between the website and data structures, specifically linking the database to the website to maintain user information. She also worked on creating the countdown clock and other back end features of the website to integrate with the front end features implemented.
Edgar Torrez (Pro team member, Senior in Computer Science @ IUPUI):
As a member of the pro team, Edgar was responsible for structuring the project into a manageable state and general front-end of the website. This includes creating a navigation bar to redirect the user to different pages with dynamic routing support. Edgar also designed each of the components to be reusable within the website.
Joseph Miller Bramer (Go team member, Junior in Economics and Business Management @ Purdue University Fort Wayne):
As a member of the go team, Joseph was responsible for working on the environmental analysis, naming the website platform, setting up external meetings and conducting interviews with outside sources. He also assisted Natalie with the empathy map and brainstorming our key features.
Natalie Kelley (Go team member, Senior in Communications and Psychology at DePauw University):
As a member of the go team, Natalie was responsible for completing the empathy mapping, the value proposition canvas, and the final business model canvas. Natalie worked with Joseph on brainstorming our product’s key features and conducted interviews with outside sources.
How did you decide on this customer segment, problem, and solution?
Our product is just a mockup of what one's team's page would look on our platform. We decided to focus on the Fever for a couple reasons: first, we wanted to foster the Indiana connection and focus on a team based here. Drawing from our own team member's experience as a young female athlete, we decided that our product should not only bring sports back to these fans but also provide an avenue to engage young girls in sports and provide them with prominent role models. Women’s sports currently represent less than 5% of TV coverage. This underrepresentation leads, among other things, to a lack of female role models, which perpetuates the notion of sports as a male-dominated industry.
Our specific mockup is intended to target families and children in Indiana, as they are the Indiana Fever's primary demographic. Our customer segment particularly focuses on the wants and needs of young girls, but acknowledges that it is the parents who are the ones paying to provide this entertainment.
COVID-19 ended all live sports when it first made its presence known, but leagues are planning to restart in "bubbles" with limited player exposure and no fans. Our product allows for anyone to watch sports again in a safe and protected environment, but also attempts to recreate some of that fan atmosphere and excitement that give sports that unique and unifying quality.
"My Home Court Advantage” brings free real-time virtual streaming of games straight from the court to the living room. This comes alongside a live chat where viewers can talk to each other or ask questions to members of the broadcasting team. The site also provides opportunities for viewers to directly engage with the broadcast through the crowd meter, personal media uploads, and a variety of giveaways. Subscribers are entitled to extra perks of their own, including exclusive chat rooms and private interviews with coaches/players.
We were inspired by the success of twitch as a one-size-fits-all platform in the esports community. Twitch’s clients have cultivated gigantic followings with an entirely virtual at-home experience, and taking some notes from their success can help us adapt to the novel circumstances posed by this pandemic. Twitch offers streams of any game you can imagine all for free at one website, and we're proposing a similar one-stop-shop for sports to simplify fans' lives.
How did your team build and iterate on the solution?
First we began by doing research, conducting interviews with experts, and drawing from our own experiences as sports fans. We found that the existing methods of delivering sports content are both unimaginative and very poorly suited to adapting to the challenges posed by COVID. We wanted to revolutionize the way people watch sports (as much as 3 coders can in 5 weeks anyway), and to do this we created a series of prototypes to test and share our ideas.
We started by assigning roles based on technical skills. Edgar had the most experience with HTML and CSS so he was tasked with the front end of the website, while Clay and Vaibbavi had more experience with JavaScript and Python so they split the back end. We released our first prototype during the second week, with the rationale that it was best to get our minimum viable product out there so we could start receiving feedback.
We sent out a link to our friends/family/coaches, and received a lot of helpful feedback. One specific piece of actionable advice came from a family member of one of our team members who advised that we streamline the user login process by offering helpful on-click redirect prompts instead of expecting our users to figure it out.
We also redesigned the design of the site after feedback from a UX professional at Cummins in a meeting that our industry coach, Paul Homer, was kind enough to set up with his colleague. This feedback was very helpful, and let us know some shortcomings in our design, how we were inefficiently using our space, and how to reduce the number of clicks it takes users to access different pages in our website. We believe that this constantly evolving prototype helped us create a truly user-friendly experience that takes user feedback from all stages of development into account.
Key Metrics
7 external interviews conducted
In an interview with personnel from the Fever organization, we learned that Fever Basketball is trying to grow women’s sports in Indiana. They want to engage with families, especially with young females, in order to grow their sport.
In a separate interview with a highly involved women's Indiana basketball fan, we learned that the fans want personal interactions with the players and coaches. The players need the fan engagement to energize and thrive through the season.
In an interview with a UX expert that works closely with our team coach at Cummins, we learned how to best minimize the wasted space on our website and how to reduce the number of clicks required to navigate around our page.
If you had another 5 weeks to work on this, what would you do next?
The limited timeframe of this project heavily limited what we were able to release. As such, we prioritized the features that were necessary for the demo and didn't have time to get around to everything we wanted to do. If we had another 5 weeks, we would look into creating a mobile app with the same features and benefits of the desktop version for added flexibility and accessibility, especially among younger demographics.
We would also spend more time on the graphic design portion of the website and recruit some artistic minds to help with that. Our design is relatively minimalist and compact, but may come off as a little boring. None of the five of us are particularly artsy, so we would ask for help with the design/color schemes/layout in order to be more visually appealing to users.
Lastly, we would continue work on the database and login options to be more flexible. We would implement our own account system with reset password links and a secured database for passwords and credit card information. We didn't have the time to do this before submission and completely outsourced the login process to Google Cloud's API, so we would revisit that and create a more dynamic login handling process if we had more time.
Key Tools, Libraries, and Frameworks
React-Bootstrap: We decided to use React-Bootstrap since our team had experience with it and it’s a popular industry front-end framework for web applications.
Flask: We chose Flask because our team had experience with it and it’s a simple, popular back-end framework.
Socket.IO: None of had experience with any of the libraries required to implement a live chat. After doing some research, Socket.IO seemed like the best option since it is commonly used in industry, works well with Python and Javascript, and had a plethora of helpful examples.
AWS-educate: We needed some way to host our prototype on the web for free, and chose AWS-educate for a couple of reasons. First, AWS is very popular in industry and we were familiar with how to use it. Second, anyone with a .edu email address is offered hundreds of dollars of AWS content, so we were able to use an EC2 instance to host our site and store our data in the cloud, all for free.
SQLite: We needed some way to store out user information like premium status and username, so we used SQLite. Flask-SQLAlchemy is database-agnostic so it would work with any database management system, but we picked SQLite because it’s the simplest and works very well for our small prototype. If our data needs change and we want to scale, we could upgrade to PostgreSQL or MySQL without too much trouble due to how flexible SQLAlchemy is.
Google: Since our prototype was created in a very short period of time by 3 relatively inexperienced developers, we decided to forego storing any sensitive user information. By requiring every user sign in with a Google account, they use a trusted 3rd party to store their sensitive information and we don’t have to worry about encrypting passwords. We chose google instead of facebook/etc. because Google doesn’t have an age restriction and is a very popular service among all age groups, but if we had more time we would offer more sign-in options.
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