T u r f m a p p

Co-founder • Product Designer

2013-Present

Introduction

Turfmapp is an app that lets you find places to play soccer and lets organizers run soccer tournaments smoothly.

Back in 2012, the idea of Turfmapp was born out of our love for soccer and maps. My brother and I wanted to create an app that aimed at solving several problems for non-professional soccer players around the world. How do you help people find where and when to play pickup soccer easily? You create a marketplace for players and facilities! Or at least that was the original plan. After several years of hard work, we’ve learned so much as first-time, non-technical founders of a tech startup, and it’s led me down the path of product design.

My primary role at Turfmapp is leading the design of mobile and web apps, as well as creating marketing materials and managing all-things product related.

I would like to go through two big products within Turfmapp in more details: Core Features and Live Tracker.

CORE FEATURES

PROBLEMS

If you move to a new city, you have no idea where to go if you’re looking to play soccer. Once you do know, there are problems with the field availability and whether there’s people already playing. There were a few apps out there but nothing comprehensive.

SOLUTIONS

Our goals were to:

1. Create a database with a map of all soccer fields (we call them “turfs”) we could gather

2. Work with existing facilities to display their availabilities

3. Make pickup soccer happen more often

We drew out what we wanted to see in the app and then went through the process of cutting out features we don’t need. I created early wireframes and mockups and talked to a lot of our friends (we had lots of soccer friends already). This was even before we finalized the name of the potential app, before we met our technical co-founder. It was just an idea and we jumped right into it. We built out a non-functional prototype with the help of our front-end developer friend. I had to learn everything from scratch (I read a lot of Paul Graham’s essays).

Fast-forward into mid-2014 and we finally launched our web-based app and secured our first customer, a soccer facility in Chicago. They posted weekly timeslots for pickup soccer, and the first-ever game was a bunch of our supportive soccer friends. From then on, my brother and I would go to at least one of these pickups every week to learn more about our users and the usability of the app.

One of the features that came out of talking to a specific demographic is that many users don’t have credit cards and oftentimes these users would come with their friends who have credit cards. So we decided to develop a feature called “Pay for Friends” within the payment flow. It takes a few more taps and their friends would be ready to play!

For 2014 and half of 2015, our core components of the app comprised of the players, the facilities and their timeslots, and the payments system (we used Braintree). These went through countless iterations. Furthermore, we had to develop for mobile on the iOS platform. Again, I was in charge and had to learn everything on the spot in terms of mobile app design, from guidelines, design patterns, colors, typography, iconography, to copy.

LIVE TRACKER

PROBLEMS

Pickup soccer can get hectic. Arguments can arise when there are a lot of teams on the sidelines waiting for their turns to play, but no one really knows who’s up next. At the beginning of a session, picking teams can also take a long time.

From all these problems combined, we knew that each session could be more efficient, which means more playing time for players. We wanted to use technology to give that trust to users and provide consistency in each session.

SOLUTIONS

By late-2014, we’d shipped Turfmapp for iOS. This Live Tracker product is only possible on a mobile platform, so that’s when we decided to go ahead with the idea. To solve the problems above, we needed a timer, scores, and the scheduling. The key to the Live Tracker is the scheduling algorithm, which automatically displays who’s up next within a team queuing system. In addition to solving the problem above, we wanted to add other fun components to the product to gamify the experience. We added the live table, where the points are recalculated at the end of every game. 

This was the most fun project I’ve ever worked on. Plenty of testing was required since we needed to get the scheduling right and the timers had to sync across multiple devices and platforms. We launched the Live Tracker product in the summer of 2015 and it was a hit amongst the groups that used it. Within a year of launching this feature, Adidas became our client and used Turfmapp to run several of their small-sided soccer tournaments within Chicago and LA.

We had to test it in real settings every week in order to perfect the product. It felt like we made incremental fixes and improvements every week or so. For example, we wanted to speed up the rotations by automatically starting games after a certain number of seconds. However, that never goes according to plan and we had to remove it.

Another example is that sometimes users forget to start the timer and when they start it late, they must wait until the clock runs out, which meant the Live Tracker was going to be delayed until the end of the session. We solved this by simply adding a button that would end the game early. There are several more examples where things don’t go according to plan when it comes to pickup soccer. What we learned was that we must allow for as much flexibility as possible in order to keep the users happy.

Marketing Materials

Working at Turfmapp requires us to become organizers ourselves. We get to experiment with different game formats within various communities. Give us a scenario and we will be able to recommend you the best game format you'll need, with efficiency and player experience in mind. Using data collected throughout the years, we have designed some infographics comparing the status quo with our recommended game formats with confidence. Below are two examples. One for 7v7 pickup soccer and one for a 5v5 tournament. The key is to strike a balance between playing time and wait time.

I designed a lot of marketing materials, especially for social media. We are big on Instagram Stories in terms of trying to engage with our users and audience. In 2017, we went on a tour around the U.S. to host small-sided soccer tournaments. We called it the Street Series Tour. Below are examples of the marketing we used on Instagram Stories and the tournament website. We also tried to get the Charity Series going but we found out the hard way that not many soccer players are willing to donate money for a good cause.