Overview

Missing out on holding up a foam finger at the Pacers’ game? What about high-fiving random fans sitting next to you after a clutch three? Our Techpoint challenge team of college students feels exactly the same way. Without face-to-face fan interaction, our team has designed a mobile platform that allows NBA fans to still continuously interact with each other while inside their own homes: NBhey. With our real-time LIVE chat feature, fans can watch a live Pacers game on tv while also connecting with thousands of people at once as if they were in a stadium! NBhey also includes an outcome-prediction trivia competition (for prizes!), where fans who want to compete with their friends and other fans can do just that! Show your co-workers who’s the biggest fan by rising through the weekly rankings!

Team Members

Daniele Pieve:

International student-athlete at Purdue Fort Wayne. I’m from Italy and this fall I will start my sophomore year. I study business and marketing. I personally gave my contribution working on the design of the ideal app that we developed and analyzing the environment and the customer profile. With the Go-Team we also contribute with the Business Canvas Model.

Landon Bundy:

Rising Senior; Data Science major at Rose-Hulman. I helped develop the concept by thinking about my experiences of attending the Indy 500 and what I will miss about not being able to attend this year. Also helped with some ideas on the front end of the app.

Leon Hayden:

Graduate Student I.U.P.U.I Computational Data Science : Developed concept, enjoyed since was able to work with people outside of my normal group. I found the experience to be a memorable one.

Nitzan Lasry:

Rising Senior; Majoring in Marketing, Business Analytics and Technology Management at Indiana University. I Took a part of the GO team and focused on the Canvas Business Model and analysis of the value proposition and customer experience of the product.

Samuel Guernsey:

Computer science major at Ball State University. I was project manager and worked on back end code and helped in the design of the UI as well.

Justin Ho:

A rising junior Industrial Engineering student at Purdue University. The majority of my time was spent on working on product development: sketching, designing, and creating UI prototypes for our mobile platform.

How did you decide on this customer segment, problem, and solution?

In our first steps, our team identified the issues that arose within sports organizations during a global pandemic. Seeing that sports teams now had to deal with limited or no fans at venues (e.g. Bankers Life Fieldhouse, Lucas Oil Stadium), it seemed like a devastating revenue loss and that the pandemic certainly hindered fan growth. Our team decided to set out to solve both these issues. In order to continue to foster fan engagement, our team believed that creating an in-game live chat was necessary to engage fans. We believed that crowd comradery and fan interaction could be replicated through a virtual chat system (similar to when video gamers stream on Twitch). Furthermore, creating an outcome-prediction competition would also encourage fans to compete with each other while continuing to watch the games. Additionally, to make up revenue loss, our team believed sponsorship from companies through our competition-based prizes would help aid and give organizations another avenue of revenue.

How did your team build and iterate on the solution?

In order to develop a product for our vision, our team started simple. Brainstorming. We made a list of the key components our app needed to include and then split into smaller groups to conquer, making sure those key features were included. The Go Team brainstormed methods to incentivize sports organizations to use our mobile platform and how the app/organizations could generate profit. The Pro Team worked on sketching a UI design and writing code to make the live chat feature functioning. Through the process of the five weeks we had together, our team (alongside our SMEs) constantly re-evaluated our design. We were constantly adding or taking away features. One notable addition that became a key feature for NBhey was trying to incorporate how friends could make a private group to compete against just each other. By the end of week three, we had a basic working prototype of our app using code.org’s APPlab. After more critiquing and re-evaluation, our team decided to make our final design prototype on Figma. Taking our first prototype and revamping it, we thought Figma was a great platform to professionally design a working prototype of our app. Members from both the Pro Team and Go team contributed to everything from entire screen designs to the font color. In the homestretch, our team believed that all our effort had been successful and that we were proud of what we created.

Key Tools, Libraries, and Frameworks

Figma was the most important tool that we used in our product development process. It allowed for our entire group to contribute to the design and prototype at once. Similarly to a Google doc where everyone has an opportunity to convey their opinions and design style.

Github was a very helpful way to share coding ideas between team members, especially in the early stages. It allowed members of the Pro Team to show exactly what they were thinking through their code. Trello was a great tool that allowed our group to organize the tasks that we needed to complete, working on, or completely finished. This allowed for our group to stay on pace to meet our goals for each week. AppLab (code.org) was where our first working prototype was designed. The simple drag and drop code made designing an app simple. UI design was very intuitive.

The Business Model Canvas Template allowed our group to discuss the key elements that our solution needed to address for the problems we identified. Knowing all the aspects we needed to address from the BMC was important to our success early to design a solution. Our professional coaches (and the Techpoint TEAM!). Our professional coaches gave a good insight and highlighted points of concerns as we were prototyping the app. They were really helpful and gave constructive comments throughout the weeks we worked with them.

If you had another 5 weeks to work on this, what would you do next?

The next step to our NBhey project is to gain insightful feedback from users and stakeholders. Our design has only been exposed to limited users and could certainly use some feedback from fans to be more fan-orientated. In order to create an effective product, our team needs to know what actual fans and users want the app to include/not-include. Due to the limited time span of 5 weeks, our team wasn’t able to grasp the various perspectives of our fans. With an extra 5 weeks, our Go Team could reach out to several sports organizations (stakeholders) to interview representatives to see what they would like to see from NBhey. To know what key features that sports organizations would like to see in our app is very important. Furthermore, reaching out to see if companies would like to sponsor prizes is also key to our app. This is especially important for revenue. We also wanted to include an ad-free feature so we could explore that with more time. Lastly, the Pro Team would start coding and structuring an actual app (based on the feedback and UI design) that could be actually downloaded on the app store!