My Role:
User Research
Product Design
Creative Direction
Illustration
Overview:
2017
Early Stage Startup
iOS App
Meet the Client
From a court booking app to the "Tinder for tennis"
That's Ellen on the far left and me on the far right during one of our team's working sessions.
Meet Ellen, the founder of Rally78 — a company born to connect tennis enthusiasts and foster community. Their mission? Make tennis more mobile. In 2017, Ellen approached Forest Giant, the design agency where I was working, to help build an MVP app for her startup. We were instantly captivated by her idea and quickly assembled a small team to bring it to life.
Our lean, cross-functional team consisted of four core roles: design (that’s me!), research, engineering, and product management. Ellen’s original vision was to create a tennis court booking system that could be integrated into clubs nationwide. However, during our initial research, interviews with club managers and players revealed scalability challenges with this approach. But they also uncovered an exciting opportunity—one that required a strategic pivot. Instead of focusing on the clubs, we shifted our attention to the players themselves, building a platform to help them connect, find opponents, and schedule matches.
Early whiteboard session where I began mapping out the app's information architecture and key user flows.
Creating paper prototypes in the early stages of a project is a great way to work fast while exploring throwaway ideas.
Pro tip - index cards are the perfect format for mobile-sized paper prototypes!
Next, I developed mid-fidelity wireframe prototypes to test core concepts and user flows within the app. These prototypes were created using Sketch, prior to the industry-wide shift to Figma.
For the MVP, I designed a simple logo, brand color palette, and product illustrations to create a welcoming visual identity for the app.
A simple onboarding process welcomed new users and encouraged them to find players in their area.
New users were prompted to setup their profile to help match them with players of similar skill level.
Users could easily find players matching specific criteria and choose to start a discussion or challenge them to a match. Our concept of "compatibility scores" made it easier to find worthy opponents at a glance.
An example of an in-app discussion and match invitation.
An example of the pre-match and post-match experiences. We designed a trophy-based system to help gamify the app and build trust within the player community.
A simple app icon I created for our iOS App Store launch.
Conclusion
How bringing an idea to life led to a key partnership
We made a USTA-branded version of the app that helped Ellen paint a vision when pitching to the United States Tennis Association.
The Rally78 project was a relatively short effort – about 12 weeks. We experienced a significant pivot during the early discovery phase, ultimately delivering a polished MVP to the iOS App Store. Ellen's initial goal was to secure something tangible that could demonstrate her idea's value to the tennis community and attract more capital. Rather than pitching a booking platform to tennis clubs, Ellen presented a consumer-facing app to the United States Tennis Association (USTA)—and successfully secured a partnership! This outcome perfectly illustrates the power of showing your vision in action rather than merely describing it in a slide deck.
While my journey with Rally78 had come to an end, I'm proud to have played a role in the first chapter of its story.
If you're a startup looking to bring your idea to life and think I can help, please get in touch!
