Boxing event organization features for app

I launched new features for an event organization app with 28,000 users. A new way for attendees to participate in large tournaments was added. Hosts were given new tools to communicate who was eligible to attend events, with a 10% adoption rate.

Taking the paperwork out of boxing

Konquer Club was an app for organizing boxing events. It automated tedious administrative tasks, such as creating event rosters, assigning boxers to weight classes, and fight matchmaking. In exchange, it would take a cut of event signup fees paid through the app. The more events run through Konquer Club, the more money it could make.

I was brought in to create prototypes of new features that would be rapidly rolled out to the userbase for testing and feedback. Visual updates were considered low priority, so I worked within the existing design system. Some standout features were the ability for event hosts to restrict eligibility of who was allowed to sign up for events, and systems to handle boxer showbouts that used different matchmaking rules than standard.

Sometimes more exclusivity is a good thing

Originally, events in Konquer Club allowed anyone to sign up. That wasn’t how actual events were run. Some events were limited by location, such as only being for Colorado residents. Others might be limited by gender. Event hosts needed a way to communicate this limited eligibility to coaches looking to sign their boxer up.

After discussion with stakeholders, it was decided that event restrictions would be written in by hosts. This was the fastest to develop on limited resources.

40% feature adoption rate in Konquer Club’s core offering

A few months after release, 10% of all events had limited eligibility set. In tournaments, 40% of them had limited eligibility. This was a good sign, because limited eligibility was a necessary pre-requisite for other, bigger features to be added to tournaments. Tournaments were a key part of Konquer Club’s business plan and adding new features was a business priority.

Adding show bouts to tournaments

The most common type of fight in amateur boxing is a matched bout. This is when two opponents of the same sex, weight bracket, and experience level were chosen to face off with each other. Show bouts are special fights that happen within a tournament to allow guests who might not normally be eligible to participate, or to give boxers without anyone else in their bracket a fight even if it is unevenly matched. Show bouts usually don’t count in a boxer’s record the same way.

Konquer Club already allowed for matched bouts, but didn’t have a way to organize show bouts. The app needed to better reflect the ways that events were actually run, by allowing event hosts to collect registrations for show bouts and match them up later.

From here, I created mockups for how show bouts would be incorporated into the typical matching process, event signup, and registration. It was important to make these changes fit in with the existing user interface. This required a lot of adjustments to existing UI rather than creating something new from the ground up.

Overall, I used text buttons instead of icons for interactive elements. This was based off of discussion with a customer support representative, who said the userbase tended to  struggle with navigating icon-heavy interfaces. Although this made the app appear slightly less modern, the usability increases for Konquer Club’s target audience was worth it.

Working within a system for highest-impact, lowest-effort designs

In general, I was often designing new additions to pages rather than the full page from scratch. Priorities were dictated by what would bring the most users to Konquer Club, so they would run their events through the Konquer system. I spent time collaborating with the CEO to brainstorm what would be the most user-friendly way to accomplish these new features with the least development effort.

Konquer Club had an existing style guide that stakeholders did not want to update. I created my mockups to reflect what was already on the app, so that users could have a consistent experience throughout. This was a good experience in how to solve problems in an existing app within a relatively short timeframe of a few months.