Five Star Fans
User Research
Branding
UX / UI Design
Front-end Development
June 2023
Product Launch
Designed for Relay
Introduction
Five Star Fans is an innovative new space to connect fans and athletes of college sports.
Working closely with our client and college athletes, I helped my team take their idea from Napkin Sketch to launch and revenue generation in 7 weeks.
The Challenge
In the current state of college sports recruitment. Fans have little to no input in the process while college athletes are seeking ways to earn compensation outside of NIL deals.
Five Star Fans came to us with an idea that they needed to bring to market in 2 months to seize a market opportunity and develop traction before fall recruiting season.
The Solution
My team sought to enable fans to engage with the college recruiting process by getting top recruits on the platform and facilitating monetized engagement
I helped build a web application, transaction system, and marketing site with incredible speed — supporting initial functionality and generating revenue within two months.
User Research
My team worked with the Five Star Fans team to interview college athletes at The Ohio State University and determine the goals of users that would interact with two distinct sides of the product:
Fans
Desire top recruits for their teams
Looking for new ways to express fandom
Want to engage in recruitment process
Athletes
Struggle to capture the value of new NIL rules
Need help managing finances after closing deals
Want to manage and capitalize on fan attention
With these points in mind, we asked ourselves...
How might we give fans a way to impact college sports recruitment in a way that supports athletes?
User Stories and Flows
Synthesizing our research, I created user stories to help organize and prioritize user goals for the product.
We needed to create a space for fans to see college recruits and convince them to join their favorite team, as well as a platform for athletes to market themselves. I created user flows to determine how both sides of the product would interact.
Branding and Design System
Five Star Fans is a product that taps into the passion, investment, and thrill of college sports.
I ran a branding workshop with our client and created a design system that empowers fans and athletes with a bold typeface and a color scheme to match the trailblazing nature of their product in the athletic space.
Connecting Fans and Athletes
After settling on a direction, I created wireframes for desktop and mobile devices that accomplished three goals:
Foster Competition
The core of the product is based around the essence of sports: competition.
I designed the crowdsourcing experience, where fans can pay to send "likes" that directly translate to athlete compensation. Athletes are incentivized to join the team that has garnered the most fan support.
Visible Fan Impact
With this product, fans can feel like they're part of the recruitment process.
I designed dashboards that show stats for every team and athlete so fanbases can directly see their impact in comparison to their rivals.
Promote Athletes
Athletes are able to expand their brand and have a platform for fans to show support.
I designed profiles for athletes to show off their achievements and dashboards for fans to engage with their favorite teams.
After these wireframes were approved by our client, I worked alongside developers on my team to code the front-end experience to design specifications on the entire site.
Impact
250+
Athletes onboarded
The Five Star Fans team leveraged the product to attract several top recruits within the first week of launch. 250+ athletes leveraged the product on Day 1 to support their brand and generate initial revenue from fan interactions.
As a whole, my team at Relay was able to design and deliver a functional, validated product in a short timeframe, setting up the Five Star Fans team for success during recruiting season.