Taiwan Celts:
Gaelic Football & Community Building
RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGN
My role:
UX Research, UX/UI design and branding, Wireframing, Prototyping
Timeline:
February 2024 - March 2024
About The Project
This website supports the Taiwan Celts of the GAA by recruiting players and offering information on Gaelic football to interested individuals. It features a calendar for events, promotes skill learning, fitness, and networking, and introduces Irish culture and sports to a wider audience.
The Problem
The Solution
The Taiwan Celts have struggled to expand their community, facing challenges in recruiting both Taiwanese locals and expats. The absence of a dedicated platform has made it difficult to effectively communicate the joy of Gaelic football and to spark interest among potential players.
To build a user-friendly website for all, from novices to experienced players, offering key details like rules, schedules, and the sport's history, while highlighting the community's ethos through intuitive and interactive design.
1.
Research
At the beginning of the design process, I investigated and collected information about the target audience, competitors, and the market.
This research helped me understand not just users' needs and preferences, but also the stakeholders' goals, which can inform and guide the design direction.
Taiwan Celts Committee interview
I first conducted an interview with the Taiwan Celts committee to understand the needs and goals of the Taiwan Celts.
User Interview
Information Clarity
Difficulty finding clear, accessible information matching one's skill level and the challenge in accessing in-depth, community-relevant content.
Cultural and Social Integration
Anxiety about engaging with an expat-led community, language barriers, and fitting in with existing skill levels.
Activity Clarity and Scheduling
Streamlining activity details and synchronizing with users’ calendars for enhanced clarity and engagement.
Inclusivity Focus
Visual Engagement
Utilizing compelling visuals to aid understanding and boost user engagement.
Promoting a welcoming atmosphere within content that celebrates inclusivity of all skill levels and nationalities.
Player Insights
Showcasing past players' testimonials to provide perspective on the team experience and inform newcomers.
Building on the insights from my analysis of several sports communities, I’ve pinpointed specific gaps and opportunities that can be utilized on the Taiwan Celts website. These findings will help solidify my ideas for enhancing the site.
User Research
Following the committee interview with the Taiwan Celts to understand their objectives, I then conducted my research through user interviews targeting expats and local Taiwanese. These discussions revealed common concerns as well as specific challenges each group faced concerning their expectations for learning new sports and integrating into communities.
These sports might not have as broad an appeal in Taiwan compared to more popular local sports.
The presence of mostly expat players and potential language barriers could discourage local Taiwanese from trying the sport.
Adventure sports require significant physical strength, potentially deterring some interested individuals.
These sports can seem overly competitive, failing to convey a welcoming atmosphere for all skill levels.
Define
2.
To gain a deeper understanding of users’ needs, pain points, and goals by synthesizing gathered information.
Ways to explore new sport
User Journey Map
After gathering user feedback, I synthesized the data to understand their journey in discovering Gaelic football and how the Taiwan Celts' website can facilitate their integration into the community.
Newcomers to Gaelic football often face uncertainty about the sport's basics, how to get involved, and the benefits of participation.
I analyzed several sports communities with characteristics similar to those of the Taiwan Celts, including the Taipei Baboons Rugby Team, Taipei Youth Program Association - Soccer, and the River Kings (River Tracing). These competitors represent exotic sports introduced by expats in Taiwan or cater to people who enjoy intense sports and value socializing within a community, similarly to the Taiwan Celts.
Gaps
To more effectively address users' pain points and needs, I began questioning:
How might we design a Taiwan Celts platform that not only cultivates a welcoming and connective environment but also potentially increases users interest in joining this community?
Brainstorm solutions
Desired Content
Ideate
User Flow
Are there specific segments within the local Taiwanese and expat communities we should focus on?
How do you plan to engage with your audience through the website?
What is the core mission of the Taiwan Celts GAA?
Colors
Low-Fidelity Wireframes
3.
User Personas
Drawing from research and user interviews, I've created personas that represent the ideal potential newcomers to the Taiwan Celts. These profiles ensure that the features and information on the Taiwan Celts website align with these personas' needs, pain points, and motivations for joining.
Motivations to join
Icons
To explore potential solutions and design directions that address user needs and pain points, creating low-fidelity wireframes helps lay the groundwork for the website's structure and user experience.
Focusing on guiding users to understand the rules, knowing how to get involved, seeing the club calendar, and signing up for membership aligns with the main goals of Taiwan Celts as well.
After creating my journey map, user personas, and synthesized insights, I developed a basic user flow for inexperienced users and expats with experience who are looking into joining training sessions.
With a clearer vision of the user flow, I began to sketch out those ideas and invited a few testers to explore if these concepts on responside website were validated for them.
Mobile Layout
Desktop Layout
Style Tile
Typography
What are users looking for?
How do you envision using the website for marketing and outreach?
Are there any long-term goals or expansions you anticipate for the website?
How do you envision the website supporting the club's day-to-day operations?
Sense of community
Advanced Features
The visual elements with typeface and color selections are inspired by the qualities of Community, Sportiness, Welcoming nature, International appeal, and Playfulness. These design choices are central to enhancing the user experience on mobile devices.
Heading
Body Font
Engagement and Onboarding
Confusion about starting out, understanding rules, and feeling part of the community.
Pain Points
Hypothesis
In Taiwan, both expats and locals are looking for communities to enjoy sports and forge friendships, intrigued by Gaelic football yet hesitant due to cultural or language barriers. They need reassurance about the benefits and inclusivity of joining the GAA community.
Opportunities
A section to see what other people’s playing experiences were (reviews).
A section to see what other people’s playing experiences were (reviews).
Use short videos and images to clarify rules, convey the foundamental, detail locations, community values, equipment needed, and joining process.
Competitive Research
Gaps & Opportunities
4.
Design
Responsive UI Design
Home Page
Events & Training
After testing the low-fidelity wireframes, feedback underscored a need for clearly displayed information, such as training times and locations.
This led me to design high-fidelity wireframes with targeted enhancements—specific sections now clearly show essential details, an emphasis on welcoming all skill levels is more pronounced, and the calendar has been reworked to intuitively highlight active dates, streamlining the search for activities.
I crafted responsive UI designs by integrating established style guidelines, allowing for a thorough assessment of the website's overall aesthetic appeal and visual harmony.
Beginner’s Guide
Event details
5.
Testing and Iteration
Now that I have the high-fidelity wireframes, I aim to gather further feedback from users, analyze the results, and make necessary improvements to the design. This step is crucial to truly understand whether my design direction and concept meet the users' needs and expectations and provide a positive user experience.
The usability testing feedback highlighted strengths in conveying a welcoming and fun atmosphere, providing straightforward rules and processes, and ensuring that instructions were clear and accessible to new players, regardless of their experience.
Usability Tests
However, there were suggestions for making event details and the calendar feature more intuitive, as well as other suggestions to improve clarity on the homepage and guide pages:
The calendar now includes colored markers to clearly signal event days, with each hue denoting a distinct activity type. Additionally, each event in the list is framed to enhance its clickability, guiding users intuitively through interaction points.
Calendar Interface Improvements
Iterated
Original
Event Detail Page Layout Enhancement
Iterated
Original
Streamlining visual hierarchy for intuitive user navigation by relocating the event image to the top, reflecting the user's journey from the event list to individual event information.
6. Final Design
Developing the responsive UI for Taiwan Celts was both challenging and enlightening, revealing cultural nuances and diverse user preferences. The design process highlighted the contrast between local Taiwanese users, who prefer visual introductions to the sport, and expats looking for community and development opportunities. This underscored the UI's role in creating a welcoming space for a varied user base, balancing user-centric design with business goals to cater to beginners, experienced players, and particularly the expat community. This project showed the impact of UI design on user experience, community building, and meeting strategic objectives.
7. Final Thoughts
To be continued
If given more time, I would enhance the site's usability and engagement by adding features such as multilingual support, developing varied skill-level training packages, and introducing interactive tutorials or games. To continuously improve user experience, I would also implement a system to track interactions, gather feedback, and monitor performance. This approach aims not only to align the site more closely with Taiwan Celts' mission to promote the sport and strengthen the community but also to guide potential players towards joining the team.
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