Ballin’ Out

Most basketball players have dreams of playing professionally, but most of us will spend our entire “careers” in parks and playgrounds playing pickup. As a player myself, I always wanted to play in different parks, searching for higher levels of competition while exploring my city through basketball.

However, finding a court was never as easy as searching “basketball court near me”. Google searches alone are too broad and many of the existing apps are bogged down in unnecessary features. Plus, not all gyms have courts and the ones that do can feel a bit “members only”. But, from New York to Seattle and around the world, there are city and municipal parks with free basketball courts looking for players.

With this in mind, I created Ballin’ Out as a basketball player, specifically for basketball players. At its core, Ballin' Out is a directory that connects humans to basketball courts and players to other players. It's a tool. The social networking is done on the court, not in the app.

One of the first aspects of the app that sets it apart is its lack of a main navigation. The reason for that is, simply, it doesn’t need one. The app is designed to reduce friction and connect a user with a court as fast as possible. As soon as they log in they can see the closest court or search for a specific court, and with one tap, they are able to see court details and app specific reviews. The simplicity of the app is its biggest strength. The minimalist design in turn creates a faster functioning app that can move as fast the player.

The court page itself is a curated set of data specific to park basketball courts. Here players can quickly see user uploaded images, provided amenities, user generated data specific to that court and user reviews to further increase the speed of their decision. What separates our reviews from Google is our focus on players. Parks are reviewed by players and not someone who wondered too far from a family BBQ and went on Yelp. (Not that there's anything wrong with that…)

To encourage exploration of new courts and neighborhoods, Ballin’ Out also tracks each court played by counting the reviews left by each user. This serves the dual purpose of incentivizing reviews and rankings while also keeping court data current.

In regard to the prototype, I wanted to focus primarily on the content and architecture of the product. With this in mind, I chose to utilize hand drawn drawn sketches and combine them with Craft Invision prototyping to convey the features and functions of the product.