Challenge

We set out on a journey to develop Longines’ equestrian event app to offer a convenient one-stop solution for multiple personas that take part in and follow horse riding events. This multifaceted iOS and Android app serve various use cases like seeing the next upcoming horse shows, signing up for horse riding competitions, ordering stable supplies, and many more.

My Role

I’m responsible for the concept and UI design of the app and carry out user research initiatives (e.g. user testings). Furthermore, I am partially engaging in product management tasks such as tasking up and writing stories, briefing the developer, documenting the project, and doing quality assurance and design reviews.

Approach And Solution

While the whole app is still work in progress, the following bullets describe how we have approached this complex undertaking.

Defining Personas and Roles

I created a straightforward AirTable that helped us to gather all the necessary bits of information about our different personas and roles. The knowledge about these personas was mainly derived from users that are currently using various distributed web forms to accomplish their tasks (e.g. horse riders that sign up for competitions). For the first three milestones of the project, we defined four distinct personas: Horse riders, trainers, stable staff, and fans.

Building a Sustainable Information Architecture and Navigation Concept

Within initial workshops, we collected all functional requirements and explored some future directions of the app. I subsequently organised all the information into meaningful buckets and drafted up an information architecture (IA). Here, it was very important for us that the IA is easy to understand, can be translated into common navigation patterns and also accommodates for new areas and functions in the future.

User Research and Testing

Apart from some simple use cases (e.g. searching for shows), we also worked on features that required a fair bit of user testing, rounds of improvement and validation of the ultimate solution. My favourite example here is the process of ordering and securely picking up stable supplies (bedding/litter and carrots, really) using a QR code handshake – fully app-assisted. For this feature, we asked stable managers to give us feedback on our prototype and interviewed them based on an interview guide I created beforehand.

Concept and UI Design

For the different functions of the app, we established a story-based approach which starts with a meeting/workshop in which I am being briefed and design requirements are discussed. Following, I create wireframes and user flows which are then discussed with the Product Manager and various stakeholders.

At this stage of the design process, I am also double-checking my intended solution with our app developer. This turned out to be crucial, as the app is developed with the cross-platform framework XAMARIN which comes along with some technical limitations compared to apps that are developed fully natively.

The UI design was created with an iOS-first mindset, as market research showed that about 80% of users in the domain of equestrian sports use iPhones. However, core components of the app such as the navigation bar, app bar, etc. were customised for both iOS and Android to guarantee a platform-specific look and feel.

• This project is work in progress – therefore, this case study only provides a glimpse of the project. If you want to know more about my process, please contact me.
• For this project, I’m contracted through hippo technology GmbH. The Longines Equestrian app is exclusively developed by hippo technology – the world-leading vendor for time tracking and software solutions in equestrian sports.