The One App You'll Need To Connect With Other Fans
Brown's Town App Concept
I was very lucky to be part of the 2 Night Stand Cleveland event that took place in conjunction with Weapons of Mass Creation 2013. A slight introduction into what 2 Night Stand is—it is a two day design hackathon where you team up with designers, developers & creatives of all types, and are given a task to design anything you want to accomplish said task in two days. It was an awesome two days.
Our objective for our two days of meet and greet design was to design anything that could boost the morale and reputation of The Cleveland Browns. If you’re not familiar with the Browns, they are a professional football team and some detail on them can be found in the dictionary under the terms lackluster, not again, and most importantly die hard fans.
So it’s the beginning of day one, and after a quick breakfast and a meet and greet with a bunch of new faces, we broke into teams. My team decided we wanted to design an app for the Browns at first, but we didn’t exactly know for what. So we sat down and got the ball rolling.
The thing about the Browns is that no matter how bad they may be playing, or where you may be watching them from, there is an unparalleled amount of team spirit. So that became our concept—design an app to connect all Browns fans regardless of location, and to provide a way to interact with people in the stadium from your couch at home. The app is also to have a second screen, on demand service that provides statistics by team, player, and almost any other metric you may want while watching the game and using the app simultaneously.
And the cherry on top, it is also a game in which users compete against each other in order to gain points, earn badges, and use those items to redeem as discounts on a slew of items that one may be purchasing in the stadium, or the official Browns online team store. Nice.
Fully Featured Right From The Home Screen
The app my team and I designed has a portal to everything you need right from the home screen. The latest social engagement is displayed up top, as well (in theory) on the Jumbotron in the stadium. This connects the insiders to the outsiders and let’s them revel in all of the Browns’…glory. Beneath that you will find your profile, ranking and any upcoming games and challenges.
The Nav Is Completely Swipeable
When opening the nav, you have two options of navigating your way through it; you can simply click the icon at the top and load up that particular section, or if you need labels simply swipe left to right to get the preview of the section with the title. Then you just click the screen and load up your selection. I think it’s idiot proof, but who knows?
Your Profile
Your profile is where you’d probably spend the most time being competitive with your friends you’ve connected with, where you can actually form a team (ex. Team Hashbrowns in this case), and what keeps a log of all of your accomplishments within the app. This includes your status—dictated by the amount of challenges you’ve completed, your score, how many badges you’ve earned, and how many games you’ve taken part in.
Beneath all of that good information is your own personal activity feed for you and your teammates, friends, or just the creeper next door to keep track of.
The Leaderboard & Prizes
The Feed
The feed has a toggle functionality built into it so you can filter out what you want to see, and what you don’t want to see.
Real Time Second Screen Experience
We designed the app with the ambition of being able to be updated in realtime within the app, and via push notifications. You’ll always have access to the score, time remaining, timeouts remaining, and all other information you might find while watching the game on ESPN.
What we came up with in order to make this section a bit more robust is to include a Game Highlights section in which you can swipe through a list to see major plays and events that have taken place since the beginning of the game. If a player shows up, you are able to tap on them and see a complete biography complete with seasonal stats.
Player & Team Roster Stats
And there you have it—the one app you need to stay in touch with the game no matter where you are; the one app that challenges you and rewards you for being a fan.
I have to give credit to my awesome team for sharing and creating this experience with me: AJ Jimenez, Jessica Paoli, Amy Schwartz and Sarah Holden. We had so much fun that our app concept was featured on AIGA’s Member gallery and App Design Served.