SNKRS
Case Study
This project is not affiliated with/sponsored by the actual brand. This is a concept study.
Summary
Nike, Inc., is an American sportswear company headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon. It was founded in 1964 as Blue Ribbon Sports by Bill Bowerman, a track-and-field coach at the University of Oregon, and his former student Phil Knight. They opened their first retail outlet in 1966 and launched the Nike brand shoe in 1972. By the early 21st century, Nike had retail outlets and distributors in more than 170 countries, and its logo—a curved check mark called the “swoosh”—was recognized throughout the world. Part of Nike’s success is owed to endorsements by athletes including Michael Jordan, Mia Hamm, and Tiger Woods.
Challenge
Nike continuously explores ways to connect with their communities, one of which are “Sneaker-heads”, or people who collect and trade sneakers as a hobby. Their app, SNKRS, provides “insider access to the latest launches, hottest events, and exclusive releases that Nike has to offer.” The goal of the project is to design an additional feature for customers to discuss and share their love for Nike sneakers. Similar to the Reddit forums, buying, selling, and trading shoes on the app would be prohibited.
Key Drivers
In order to accomplish our objectives and tackle this challenge, we need our users to be able to:
Display what sneakers they already own, and verify their legitimacy
Showcase their interests or preferences (lifestyle, fashion, basketball shoes, colors, collabs)
Post and reply to content
React to other users’ posts or comments
Include a guide for tips and tricks to getting sneakers when they drop
Design Process
Affinity Map
Competitive Analysis
We began this project by thinking about a primary competitor of Nike SNKRS, Adidas, and checked out their respective apps and created a Strength-Weakness-Opportunities-Threat, or SWOT, Analysis chart but… they also didn’t have a community feature!
Sephora App SWOT Chart
Adidas App SWOT Chart
So we looked at our secondary competitors that also have a community feature (and made respective SWOT analysis charts again) to understand our target audience more and to work towards enhancing the SNKRS app user experience.
Reddit App SWOT Chart
User Research
“Select your Age Range.”
“What are some of your favorite features on social media apps that you would incorporate in a sneakers app?”
Posting and messaging
Sharing the product you like
Discussions about sneakers
Favoriting/Liking feature
Being able to comment on someone's shoe or collection.
Sneaker-lovers chat room
With a general understanding of our competitors, we wanted to focus on our target audiences needs. We used a survey to identify what users would like to see in the Community feature of the SNKRS and do users of the app even want to have this feature. Based on the results of 27 participants answering our survey questions, we saw these results:
“What is your gender?”
Affinity Map and Persona
To summarize our survey results, we created an affinity map. Once we gathered enough information to understand our target audience, we created a persona to represent an archetype of the surveyed users.
Persona Chart
Style Guide
The official SNKRS app uses two font styles that aren’t available for public use. The closest free fonts that resemble them were Helvetica Neue and Futura Condensed Extra-Bold.
Mid-Fidelity Wireframes
SNKRS iOS App Interests page
SNKRS iOS App Profile page
Hi-Fidelity Prototypes
1st Demo of SNKRS iOS App
2nd Demo of SNKRS iOS App
Takeaways
Overall, our team and I did an awesome job in creating the Community feature for the SNKRS app. Our competitive analysis research was crucial in determining the do’s and don’t’s of designing elements and the layout of the pages, and also helped us get inspired to create something better.