About INDYCAR:

INDYCAR LLC is an Indianapolis-based auto racing sanctioning body most popular for franchising the INDYCAR racing series as well as other open-wheel racing competitions. INDYCAR currently has the second-largest racing fan base in the US after NASCAR and has huge popularity with its world-famous INDY 500 held during Memorial Day weekend in the Indianapolis Speedway racetrack every year.

The initial step started by examining minutely the features of the current INDYCAR Sport app. Along with that, I took the lead in conducting an extensive competitive analysis with other sport-centric applications present in the entertainment market.

The focus group was targeted in the 25 to 34 year old age range as per our client needs focussing on current fans as well as fans of various other sport-centric applications.

We distributed surveys and interviewed 10 participants to learn about goals, activities and interests.

The findings we learned from user interviews & competitive analysis, helped us to work on the affinity diagramming to view INDYCAR and other sport-centric app usage patterns, as well as general sports fan behaviors. Based on it we created 2 personas with whom we empathized to gather the most needed features. 

Potential INDYCAR fan synthesis

INDYCAR fan synthesis

In order to provide users with enhanced and interactive features, I brainstormed 10 ideas from both fans and potential fans perspectives to meet their needs.

I created 3 design concepts based on the ideation, targeted towards application engagement and potentially helping in gaining more fans.

Design Concepts

Based on the feedback from INDYCAR, I started our work on designing the initial low-fidelity design screens.

I created the first digital screens to better understand the application flow with the new features getting incorporated. I tested it with two users before moving forward but discovered that there wasn’t enough detail for users to complete the tasks.

Major feedback from the tests:

• No prior selection feature of favorite driver and team eventually leading to confusion among the users. They wanted a detailed screen to select their favorite drivers.

• Users were unable to differentiate between the Overview and the AR view options. As it looked more of text to them rather than clickable features.

• The arrow mark in the topographic screen confused the users thinking it to be a button to check different views on the screen.

These tests gave a clearer understanding and led to a quick transition to our second, more detailed prototype following the internal design system of INDYCAR.

I created a detailed information architecture diagram by understanding the mental model of the end-users before performing the second round of evaluations.

This eventually helped me to create the entire application structure in a newly enhanced format.

Since I added almost all the improved functionalities for the mid-fidelity prototypes so my final high-fidelity design moved forward smoothly, only with some minimal changes such as:

• Providing more details in the favorite driver screen along with the feasibility of adding multi drivers as the favorite based on the user preferences

• Discarding the concept of adding a table to show the race statistics in the overview and AR view as it was leading to a UX problem.

• Increasing the sizes of the screens along with designing an accurate 3D Liveries button making it more user-friendly for the fans.

Additionally, I improved the information architecture based on the feedback received

A click-through Figma prototype of the final INDYCAR application is shown:

I interviewed 10 participants out of which 3 were potential INDYCAR fans and 7 being current INDYCAR fans who were asked to perform a set of 3 tasks.

Measuring the success rate based on the completion of the above 3 tasks: