CrewLove App

Mobile app for finding a run crew in any city

This project was born out a personal need, with no good solution: finding a run crew in a new city. When I moved to London, joining the run crew scene was how I found my community — it made London feel like home. In an age where making friends as adults has become challenging

Project Type
Independent

Time Constraint
8 weeks

Team

Sole Designer + Product Manager (Me), 2 Frontend Engineers, 2 Backend Engineers

Tags
fitness, location, 0-1, product design, running

Defining Product Vision

When moving to a new city or traveling to a new city, it’s really difficult to find a run crew without knowing people “in the scene” via word-of-mouth or social media. When I first moved to London, I had to do a lot of sifting through Instagram and Reddit posts — and even then, the run crew I run with now was purely found through word of mouth eventually. Is there really no way to just find a run crew using location?

Well… I thought… then let’s make one!

Opportunity

  • The opportunity here is the lack of any application that allows people to easily find run crews they can run with when they land in a new city

KPIs + Success Metrics:

  • App downloads

  • Retention rates

  • Number of active users

  • App store rating

Device:

Anytime + anywhere = mobile app (iOS/Android)

Value Proposition

User Goal:

A way to easily find running crews and running events in any city in the world.

Organization Goal:

To create a global digital running crew community and bring people together via both digital and physical experiences.

How I got there…

User Research - Planning

Target Users:

Avid runners, active travellers (including people who travel for work + digital nomads), all run crew runners and run crew leaders

Very Simple Poll

Asked people currently in running crews HOW they found their run crew. Poll administered via running crew group chats (Discord, WhatsApp, etc.)

How did you find your running crew? (n=90)

  • Social media: ~46.67% (n=42)

  • Word of mouth: ~42.22% (n=38)

  • Web search: ~0.02% (n=2)

  • Other: ~0.09% (n=8)

Focus Group - Define User Journey (n = 3)

I conducted a contextual semi-structured interview with 3 running crew members from the LDN SLCT run crew in London. Although this was a small participant pool, this focus group allowed me to go deep into understanding their needs, wants, motivations, and frustrations. We went on a trip to Venice, Italy, where I was able to put them in the context of arriving in a new city so they could walk me through how they would search for a run crew in a new city with the currently available resources.

Goals of the qualitative user research:

  • Understand the current user journey of finding a run crew in a new city

  • Find out the pain points of the current process and how it can be improved

  • Find out their motivations for finding a run crew in a new city

Interview Questions:

  • Why did you join a run crew?

  • How did you find your current run crew (LDN SLCT)

  • What role has social media played in your sense of belonging or community in the run crew space?

  • We just landed in Venice, Italy. Under the assumption you don’t have any connections to the running scene here, how would you go about finding a running crew in this new city?

    • Can you walk me through the process?

  • What information is important when. you look for a run crew? For example, in London there are several groups. How did you pick the one you are currently a part of now?

Current Workflow - Finding a run crew in a new city

Using the results of the focus group and other primary/secondary user research methods, I visualized the current task flow of how runners find “running crews” when they move or visit a new city. This allowed me to identify which tasks are foundational, where there are inefficiencies and redundancies, and how I can use the existing work flow as a skeleton for the app so that the features of the app remain familiar in terms of work flow but with addd convenience, ease, and value.

Pain Points:

  1. No centralized platform to view all run crews 

  2. No way to filter through all run crews based on locations

  3. No way to filter through all run crews based on preferences

  4. Finding run crews is usually through social media “stalking”, deep seraching or networking — lots of digging through

  5. No easy way to find out what the requirements of joining a run crew is (membership fee, pace threshold, etc.)

New User Flows for ‘Crew Love’ App

In conjunction with the competitive market analysis, I used the above work flow to identify four user task flows to build out for the app (for the MVP, I focused on flows 1 + 2) :

  1. Sign Up/Log In Flow*

  2. Search for/discover run crews based on location*

  3. Connect + Find Friends (Community)

  4. Build out personal dashboard

New Workflow - “Sign Up” + “Log In” flow

Points of Focus:

  1. Ease of sign up

  2. Easily incorporate social media logins with SSO because many run crew runners are avid social media users

  3. Adding preferences allows for a personalized view that will make giving suggestions for run crews easier

  4. The preferences should be a workflow that allows users to be guided

  5. The welcome screen should set the tone for the app that represents the “cool, inclusive, and sociable” aspects of running

New Workflow - Discovering run crews based on location

Points of Focus:

  1. Should be able to use one’s current location to search for run crews “nearby”

  2. Should be able to search run crews through the contacts/friends list and which run crews they have visited/frequented or liked

  3. Ensure user privacy is an option if users don’t want their preferences or frequented run crews to be viewed

  4. Allow users to manually filter run crews based on preferences

  5. Allow users to view each run crew and explore what the crew’s sessions and “vibes” are like

Feature Prioritization + App Site Map

The Design, V1

Reflections [Work In Progress]

Learning N°1:

Reflections to come.

＜Yemaya

Pause＞