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Guardianship
Timeline
January 24 - September 24
Role
Lead UX Designer and Researcher
Tools
Figma
Qualtrics
Confluence / Jira
SportsEngine is a youth sports management software that allows organizations and teams to run their businesses. On the DTC-facing platform My SportsEngine, all users can manage their accounts, profiles, and eligibility. Our job is to create functional technology that allows parents, participants, coaches, and admins to spend less time online and more time on the field.
In SportsEngine accounts users have the ability to add profiles, these profiles are athletes under the age of 18. Guardianship is a feature that we offer since profiles can only be owned by one account. Guardianship allows another individual with a SportsEngine account to view or manage the sports life of an athlete who does not live within their account.
My goal with this project is to improve upon our existing Guardianship feature by improving upon the existing workflow, creating multiple types of guardian access levels, and making sure our users are receiving critical communications to build trust and loyalty with our software.
Problem
“I just need Mom, Dad and Daughter to all have the same access and communication with only the Daughter actually being represented on the roster.” - User Quote
Parents and guardians need to give access to other adults to help manage young athletes' sports lives within our software and outside on the field. The previous functionality of guardianship only allowed people with access to view the profile’s information, and sports schedule, and receive communications to the teams and organizations. However, we were missing a key piece of what our users needed out of this feature. Which was, they not only wanted to view this profile’s information, but also help manage the profile, by registering the child for new sports seasons, buying memberships for this profile, and paying outstanding invoices.
I was tasked with building out this new Guardianship feature; researching what our users needed from Guardianship, validating our assumptions, and redesigning the UI to make this feature accessible across devices.
Building the right thing
Once my product team identified that Profile, Accounts, and Household Management was our team theme for our product roadmap. The existing Guardianship feature stuck out in our minds as a huge opportunity to impact our users greatly and improve our loyalty and trust with our user base.
The first step was to identify what our users needed out of this feature and how I could make that happen. My product team had ideas for what we needed, however, I not only wanted to validate our assumptions but also speak to real customers to make sure we were building the right thing.
I began speaking with our larger enterprise clients about what they needed and the parents of athletes within their organizations needed out of the guardianship feature. I cross-referenced these insights with other employees at our company who were real users of our software... to see what the gaps were within the feature. Lastly, the My SportsEngine platform had Qualtrics embedded so we could collect real-time user feedback via survey results, their analytic feature DXA, and speaking to our CS team.
After this research process, I put together a card sort exercise to synthesize the data that I had collected. What stuck out is parents and guardians of athletes invite people to access the profiles of athletes for a myriad of reasons. I expanded upon our existing personas to exemplify the use cases of this feature.
These personas helped me identify that the Guardianship feature needed to fit two major use cases. That of our persona Tom, who needs to take a larger role in registering his child for sports and buying memberships; to ensure his son is signed up and eligible for the next sports season. The other use case being Barbara. Barbara is a grandparent, she isn’t involved in the preseason coordination of signing up her grandson for the team or ensuring he has all his eligibility requirements in order. She is there for the in-season support. She wants access to his schedule and team communications to be able to help bring him to practice and games, as well as, watch her grandson play on the field.
With these use cases in mind, I started to build two different access levels for the guardianship feature; Manager Access and Viewer Access.
Manager Access is for people like Tom who need full access to the young athlete's profile, to help get requirements and signup in order so Timmy can play in the upcoming season.
Viewer Access is for people like Barbara who need to know when and where Timmy needs to be to participate in his sporting events. This access level is for caretakers, extended family, and all individuals who are there to watch Timmy play but don’t need to coordinate getting him registered to be on the roster.
Once I defined what those access levels were going to be I sorted user actions within our platform in the categories of those access levels to let other stakeholders know what the vision is for this new feature. I then presented this to our product and technical teams, my UX teammates, and CS/Marketing. To make sure we were aligned on what this new feature is that will be built.
Creating the new feature
After I’ve identified what needed to be built I went into building out the user journey for our persona Natalie. This encompassed how she would navigate to the Guardianship feature, granting, removing, and changing permissions to our young athlete Timmy.
The next step after building out the user journey was using our design system to create the screens for the the new feature. This involved the creation of net new components for our design system, to create design patterns to be followed in all user journeys involving profile and account data.
Once the new feature was designed and the members of the product team all approved of my proposed designs. I began to tackle the next portion of this project, which was communications. I needed to map out how communications, such as invitations and notifications, were sent out. I built out a series of diagrams mapping out the communications that will be sent to our users and individuals whom they invite to be a guardian within their account. These communications included adding guardian notifications, removing guardian notifications, and changing existing guardian access level notifications.
After I mapped out and drafted the content for these email communications. They were reviewed by our legal team before our developers could begin work.
Internal Beta release
Once we finished development on this project and went through a few QA reviews it was time to release the new and improved Guardianship feature. However, releasing this feature was a bit more complicated due to the coordination of development across multiple product teams. My product owner, product director, and I proposed we run an internal Beta release with employees who use our software in their personal life.
We put the Guardianship feature behind a feature toggle and had employees sign up to be a part of our Beta release. All employees who opted-in then had the feature toggle turned on for their accounts so they could test this feature in real-time.
After a few weeks of our internal Beta release, we collected feedback and iterated upon any outstanding issues. Overall, the new feature works extremely well, and much of the feedback was minor tweaks to copy or small bugs.
Before we could officially release, we had to work with our Marketing team to come up with a go-to-market strategy. We wanted to silently release this new feature, since the release was sensitive, as well as, to collect feedback before running a marketing campaign.
Release and measuring project impact
We released the new guardianship feature in early September 2024. To be able to measure project success and impact we coordinated with CS to report any feedback relating to this feature, I created a feedback survey in Qualtrics in tandem with the release to measure user sentiment, and we embedded the Qualtrics DXA feature to have analytic data.
Since release, we’ve had well over 500k unique users. Over 2.3 million page views and no known bugs/issues logged related to the release. Users also reported greater satisfaction as the Guardianship feature is now meeting their expectations and fits their needs. Plus, we’ve received positive feedback on the new and improved UI of the page.
My team and I are now working on the discoverability of this feature by placing the Guardianship workflow into some of our major user journeys within our software.
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