Nike Run Club (NRC)
Role: Project Manager
Duration: November 1-28, 2021
Some highlighted features are:
Run, users can start a run and the app will track users location to record running data, start a tutorial to get instructions from professional coaches on running and training, and build a habit of running over time.
Activity, users can review running histories and statistics, such as the time, pace, distance, heart rate data of each run
Challenges, users can join weekly or monthly running challenges. For example, run 5 kilometers in one week.
And finally, club, which is a social feature for users to compete with friends and view the running distance on the leaderboard.
Professional training and activities tracking for runners on a mobile app, available for both Android and iOS platforms
Highlighted Features
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Run
Start a run, guided runs, training plans
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Activity
Stats on recent run activities
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Challenges
Weekly & Monthly challenges
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Club
Leaderboard, events, add friends
Business Issue
The current NRC app put an emphasis on the development of the ‘run’ feature. It equips basically every feature a runner needs. However, we noticed that NRC might have overlooked the importance of social elements in their app. Now that we might have limited access to our friends in real life sometimes, there's a rising demand for people to seek interpersonal connections through the Internet and our electronic devices. Although the app is built up with some social features such as ‘Club’ with sections ‘Leaderboards’ and ‘Events’, the functionality of the current features remains on a relatively low level. We therefore proposed to improve the social features in NRC so that users are able to connect with each other and build social bonds.
NRC Users
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Interactions and communication with other users
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Being socially motivated and engaged in running
Nike Stakeholders
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Reduce user acquisition costs
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Maintain and improve user retention
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Build brand awareness for NRC
Relevant Parties
Two relevant parties that might benefit from our proposed features are NRC users and NIKE stakeholders.
For users, they benefit from having interactions and communication with other users and being socially motivated and engaged in running.
The social features might encourage users to introduce their friends and family as new users and thus promote NRC. This is beneficial for NIKE stakeholders to reduce NRC user acquisition costs, maintain and improve user retention, and build brand awareness for NRC.
How Might We
reinforce users' connections with their friends and families and facilitate the social connections between unfamiliar users
by upgrading the existed social features on the app?
Sprint Planning
At the planning stage, We collaborated with the development team to arrange a sprint planning meeting to ensure that everyone on the team is on the same page about the Sprint goal. To do so, we've defined the product backlog, created user stories for the work to be done, and decided how the work should be scheduled for the first few days.
Product Backlog
Nike Run Club (NRC) is a mobile app available on both Android and iOS, which provides professional training analysis, tutorials, and running challenges for all types of runners. Now that we might have limited access to our friends in real life sometimes, there's a rising demand for people to seek interpersonal connections through the Internet and our electronic devices. Although the app is built up with some social features such as ‘Club’ with sections ‘Leaderboards’ and ‘Events’, the functionality of the current features remains on a relatively low level. Therefore, we have created two product backlogs to improve the existing friends feature and make the app more interactive.
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The product should have a challenge and reward system with social elements implemented so that users have multiple ways to interact with their friends and challenge
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The product should have a chat interface where users can contact their friends by sending messages, emojis, challenge invitation, and so on.
User Stories
User Story 1:
As a Nike+ Run Club App user, I wish I can challenge my friends with a weekly challenge Run, so that all of us can stay motivated to run and have better and more interesting running experiences.
User Stories & Story Points
Total story points: 7
Before After
2 Points → 5 Points
Story 1: As a Nike+ Run Club App user, I wish I can challenge my friends with a weekly challenge Run, so that all of us can stay motivated to run and have better and more interesting running experiences.
Before After
5 Points → 2 Points
Story 2: As a Nike+ Run Club App user, I wish I can communicate with my friends through the app, so that we can encourage and motivate each other through the app.
We have created two user stories and assign points for each story. We gave the first user story two points and the second user story five points because we considered the second user story would require more work to complete.
However, after discussing with the development team at the conclusion of the project, we discovered that the first user story actually required more effort to fulfill because the design process is more complicated. We found the reason that cause this situation was due to lack of experience of completing user stories and development. For future project, we will have a better sense of estimating the points as we know how the design process going to look like and how much effort that each story might take.
Sprint Backlog
Since we had four weeks to work on this project, each week has a sprint backlog for the development team to complete.
Week 1: Create User flow
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Using a flow chart
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Define the entry point where a user accesses the feature initially.
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Define the steps to completion (all elements needed to achieve the sprint goals)
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Design the final interaction
Week 2: Design low-fidelity prototype
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Design the layout
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Research the NIKE guidelines and make sure the interface design is consistent
Week 3: Conduct User test and make adjustment accordingly
Week 4: Create medium-fidelity prototype
Project Development
User FLow
Low-Fidelity Prototype
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Incorporates feedback from product owners
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Adds required images
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Adds complete conformance to NIKE UI standards
The low fidelity prototype starts at the Nike Run Club Leaderboard screen, which lists our current Club friends and their progress. From here, we can issue one of our saved challenges to a friend or switch to the Challenges page to create a new challenge.
We can select a one time challenge or a one week challenge, set a name, distance, and date, and create the new challenge.
Each challenge displays the distance run by the user so far and other details. The user can return to the Leaderboard or immediately issue the challenge to a friend.
If we want to issue a previously created challenge to a friend, we can return to the Leaderboard screen, tap the Challenge button beside the friend, and select the desired challenge.
Returning to our Challenges screen, we can view, accept, or join challenges our friends have issued to us. This challenge says we have won, so we open it, check the details, and claim our victory badge.
To chat with one of our friends, we tap the message icon in the menu that’s at the bottom of every screen.
The Inbox screen displays the status of our current conversations. We tap our friend’s name and the chat screen opens.
From here, we can send text, photos, files, make a voice call, or issue a challenge.
When we are done, we can tap the Run icon at the bottom to return to the Run Club screen.
High-Fidelity Prototype
The medium fidelity prototype incorporates the feedback from the product owners, adds all required images, and completes the conformance to the NIKE user interface standards.
Scrum Management
Management Tools
Every project, as well as each job inside it, has a deadline. The product owner must have excellent management abilities in order for the project to run smoothly and on time. Managing the backlog include adding, adjusting, and prioritising backlog items to ensure that all information is clear, transparent, and visible to the development team. We utilised Microsoft Teams to interact with the development team and Trello to keep track of the project's progress.
Using Microsoft Teams makes communication and collaboration easier, more productive, and more flexible. WE were able to answer the development team’s questions and provide feedback anywhere and anytime.
With Trello, we have set each sprint with a deadline, the development team can check which tasks need to be done and when in order to utilize their time better. As product owner and scrum master we can also see their progress through the tool.
Development Timeline: November 1-28, 2021
The team set the sprint time-box to four weeks. The product owners provided the requirements and feedback to the developers for each stage of development. The developers were able to complete the two user stories within the sprint timeframe. The team calculated the sprint development velocity to be 7 points.
Sprint Retrospective
What worked well
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Degree of completion and punctuality
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Effectiveness of communication
High degree of completion and punctuality: All the sprint items are completed in a high degree of completion by our development team on time. Our development team members are highly self-managing and little intervention from the project owner side is required.
Effectiveness of communication: Whenever the development team or us had questions or concerns on the action items, the person who is responsible for that issue would respond and take actions if needed. We never left any question or misunderstandings unresolved.
What can be improved
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Tracking of working progress
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Clarity of user stories
Tracking of working progress: At the beginning of the sprint, we used Trello to list our daily tasks and distribute them to each team member to make sure everyone has their own task to complete. However, we lost track of that in the middle of our sprint. This might due to a small total number of action items in our sprint, we are able to track our progress without listing the action items. In a context where there are more action items, we will benefit more from tracking our progress using tools such as Trello.
Clarity of user stories: Our first user story is a bit broad, which makes it more like an epic. This is due to our lack of knowledge of the difference between user stories and epics. In future scrum project, we will make more detailed user stories to improve the clarity.