Countless practices, high-intensity competition, and shared rituals naturally foster strong bonds within athletic teams. Yet at Wellesley, athletes have few opportunities to maintain these connections off the field and even fewer opportunities to create meaningful relationships beyond the silo of their own team.

Through contextual inquiry interviews, we found that athletes were seeking informal, social ways to stay connected with their teams and form new connections across varsity and club sports. In response, we designed Blue, an app named for Wellesley’s school color, to create a space where athletes can discover each others' events and share photos and updates, ultimately building a stronger sense community where all Wellesley athletes can motivate, support, and uplift one another.

This semester-long project for my Human–Computer Interaction course at Wellesley began with a seemingly simple prompt: design an app related to athletics on campus. In our initial brainstorming session about the different lenses we could approach the topic with, my teammates and I quickly learned that we each brought different perspectives to the table. I was a club sport athlete, one teammate competed at the varsity level, and the other actually occupied both spaces. We soon recognized a common pain point: a lack of community between teams, especially between varsity and club sport athletes.

While our personal experiences helped surface this initial topic, we were conscious of our own positionalities and that designing from our perspectives alone would be limiting. We moved forward with a general plan of addressing the lack of connections between varsity and club sport athletes, and ensured our design catered to a plurality of perspectives by understanding the real challenges, needs, and goals of athletes across campus.

To design for Wellesley varsity and club sport athletes, we first had to empathize with their experiences. To begin doing so, we conducted contextual inquiry interviews with six athletes across teams, years, and leadership roles. Interviews took place in the Keohane Sports Center before or after practice to reflect a realistic use context of our app.

Our interviews focused on three core areas that would inform the direction of Blue:

Team Dynamics

Experiences within athletes' own team

Athletics Community

Current connections across Wellesley Athletics

Desired Features

How an app, framed as a platform inspired by both Instagram and Strava, could improve these experiences

Participants responded to open-ended questions spanning the three areas, providing valuable insight into their needs, challenges, and aspirations, which formed a strong foundation for our app’s specific goals and overall design direction.

We synthesized interview responses using thematic analysis to identify recurring patterns across the six participants responses. Two overarching themes emerged:

Athletes not only want to create bonds with other teams, but strengthen their own team dynamics.

"Sometimes it feels like each team is kind of in their own little bubble. But even with my own teammates, it’s still hard to keep in touch with everyone."

Athletes want an app that centers connections, not performance.

"I'd love a way to casually inspire others to workout, like by posting to a team page, rather than requiring and enforcing workouts as their captain."

At the core of athletes’ relationship to Wellesley athletics is their relationship with their own team. When imagining a platform for all Wellesley athletes, participants emphasized the need for a home base, a space where they could motivate their own teammates, create inside jokes, and feel comfortable engaging. Our initial concept centered around a feed where all Wellesley athletes could interact with each others’ posts, but interview insights showcased the need for a team-specific feed as well, allowing athletes to engage both beyond and within their teams.

Participants also noted that what they value most in social fitness trackers like Strava isn’t access to others’ exact performance metrics, but the ability to stay connected to their friends’ athletic lives. In designing an athletics-centered app, we chose to center the athlete, not athleticism. Features such as a calendar of upcoming games and the ability to share photos and updates from everything from physical therapy to tournaments foster encouragement, visibility, and connection over competition.

Athletes at Wellesley lack informal, intra-team and cross-team social opportunities, limiting their ability to form bonds that strengthen performance, morale, and a broader sense of community.

We created a storyboard to visualize a primary use case of the app. It illustrates the context of use: where the user is, what they are doing, and their goals for doing so, as well as how the user interacts with the device to accomplish their goal and the resulting impact on their environment.

We developed two distinct design directions inspired by Instagram and Strava, tailoring their core features to better serve Wellesley athletes. By leveraging external consistency with widely used platforms, we aimed to enhance interface learnability, enabling new users to focus on meaningful connecting and engaging rather than navigating usability challenges.

Based on feedback from both design iterations, we moved forward with the second design, implementing key changes to improve usability and strengthen social interactions. A new “Today’s Events” frame will appear at the top of the Wellesley Athletics homepage, highlighting upcoming events in a way that balances visibility and clarity. From there, users can navigate directly to the full calendar page, addressing feedback from those who preferred a separate tab while reducing clutter on the homepage. To further improve usability and efficiency, we introduced a filter that allows users to sort posts by team.

We conducted six usability tests of our wireframe with members of our target audience who we had not yet interviewed, having them complete a set of representative tasks and answer a series of questions to capture their impressions. This approach helped us observe where participants moved easily through the interface and where they hesitated or became confused, informing how we moved forward with our high-fidelity prototype.

Testing Protocol Tasks

• Post to the Wellesley Athletics page
• Find details for an upcoming Volleyball game
• Comment under a teammate’s post

Post-Task Questionnaire

• How would you use this app in vs. out of season?
• What was confusing?
• What suggestions do you have?

Key Findings

• Navigation worked well: tab bar icons were intuitive
• Profiles were clear: users understood badges + posts
• Posting flow: most could create posts with few issues

Pain Points

• Commenting was not intuitive
• Filter bar caused confusion (events vs. posts?)
• Horizontal calendar felt unintuitive
• Image upload interaction unclear
• “Post title” field confused users

Design Adjustments

• Switch calendar to vertical layout (Google Calendar consistency)
• Allow posting to both Athletics & team pages
• Replace comment icon with a clearer one
• Clarify photo upload options (upload vs. capture)
• Refine post creation page (title purpose clearer)
• Add ability to create new calendar events

We used affinity diagramming to group insights from our low-fidelity usability tests by page, helping us identify patterns and recurring pain points. This allowed us to prioritize design improvements and make strategic decisions to address the most critical user needs.

Testing Protocol Tasks

• Comment under a teammate’s post.
• Create and delete an event on the Event Calendar.
• Locate Crew’s next race.

Post-Task Questionnaire

• Rank satisfaction from 1–10.
• Identify confusing parts of the app.
• Describe missing features or desired functionality.
• Note areas that were easy to use or successful.

Usability Metrics

• Total time taken to complete tasks
• Number of errors
• User-ranked satisfaction score

Average Metrics

• Total time: 3:03
• Number of errors: 1.83
• Satisfaction score: 8.83/10

User Testing Summary

User	Total Time	Errors	Satisfaction	Key Observations
1	3:26	1	9/10	Confused by feed vs. event; liked inter-team bonding features.
2	3:14	2	8/10	Calendar intuitive; suggested scrolling improvements; profile edit button small.
3	2:37	1	9/10	Clarified "teammate"; suggested back button; enjoyed layout clarity.
4	4:13	3	10/10	Minor navigation confusion; clear layout; enthusiastic about app concept.
5	2:48	2	8/10	Event creation confusing; commenting and feed posting easy; liked Insta + Google Calendar feel.
6	2:00	2	9/10	Loved icons and commenting; slight confusion between feed vs. calendar posts.

Design Adjustments

• Commenting was consistently easy and enjoyable.
• Visual layout, icons, and feed navigation praised for clarity and intuitiveness.
• Common confusions: calendar post vs. event post, Wellesley Athletics vs. Team feed.
• Suggested improvements:
  • Increase size or labeling of the add event button.
  • Add text to home bar icons to clarify differences.
  • Include back buttons or navigation cues for calendar events.
• Overall, users were highly satisfied and excited about the app concept.