Summary

Grassroots Soccer Academy is a youth soccer organization based in Maryland to connect players with recreational and competitive program opportunities. Their goal is to increase the number of youth soccer players in the Maryland area who go on to play for competitive leagues.

GSA was struggling to get sign-ups in a user-friendly way, their method of registration was an insecure form with an unintuitive payment system. They wanted an e-commerce website to collect registrations securely, and display information about their various camps and programs.

Process

I was hired as the UX Designer, Web Developer, and Social Media Manager. I was responsible for collecting requirements and feedback from the head coach, designing and developing the website, designing and managing all social media content, and answering customer messages.

I iteratively updated the prototype in a web CMS. I collected feedback to influence changes and subsequently finalized the design.

Results and Impact

The e-commerce components of this site mean that, for the first time ever, GSA supports secure, fully-online, automated registration where people can purchase access to camps and programs in just a few clicks. Through SEO search indexing we have increased the reach of GSA to interested parties throughout Maryland. Our website shows up as a first result on Google. The head coach and several parents of children in the program have praised our design.

Takeaways

The challenge of this project was verifying that all of the payment processing and e-commerce components worked seamlessly and felt intuitive to the user. This was achieved by conducting user testing and crafting user journey maps to track the positive performance of our e-commerce experience.

I learned the importance of iterative user testing throughout this project, as it was truly valuable to be able to test out how our payment system was working by observing user behavior.