slimesvb.com is a SMS & web-based application used by members of my volleyball community to join and host games. The current release only supports games specifically within my 100+ member community, Slimes Volleyball, but the end goal is a generalized app that enables individuals to join games hosted by any group.
I started playing volleyball just over a year ago, and I’ve been hooked ever since. Playing volleyball as an adult isn’t easy—it’s a sport that requires 12 people to coordinate their busy schedules and, on top of that, book an available court. There are already a lot of apps that people use to try to facilitate volleyball games: Meetup, GoodRec, Discord, TeamReach, WhatsApp… but none of them do the job well enough to dominate.
This is where SlimesVB comes in.
There are two sides to SlimesVB:
- The SMS sign-up functionality with a minimalist mobile web UI for players
- The web-based admin dashboard for hosts to organize games
For the purposes of this project brief, I’ll be focusing on the users who are players/attendees. Players will always make up the majority of the user base, and they were my main focus when working on the MVP.
These are the player-facing issues that SlimesVB aims to address:
- People can’t be bothered to download, sign up, and familiarize themselves with another mobile app.
- Even if they do go through the onboarding process, they now have one more app to check, or they’re inactive and miss sign-up notifications.
- People forget what they’re signed up for because of limited calendar/event functionality.
- People want to play with closed-invite groups. This is often for the purposes of playing with friends only, or to ensure the integrity of the advertised skill level.
The first point of friction for joining games via a mobile app is just having to sign up and create an account. In order to eliminate this, I designed a streamlined onboarding process where the user texts a keyword to the SlimesVB toll-free phone number to opt-in to game invitations. This serves two purposes: 1.) explicit user consent is required to send SMS, and 2.) the user’s phone number can be used to identify them moving forward. The keyword prompts a few onboarding questions that the user can answer directly in their text messages: first name, last name, position, and the name of the person who referred them. Since the player UI is mainly SMS-based, there’s no need for the user to create an account, log in, or download anything.
The streamlined sign-up process was inspired by Partiful. Users receive SMS invitations with an event URL that displays additional details such as the player roster, payment status, and announcements. Sensitive information is hidden (last names, date and location of event) unless the user is logged in.
The general user flow to sign up for a game looks something like this (via SMS interactions):
- User receives a text invitation from a group they are subscribed to, for example:
”SlimesVB: You're invited! Sep 19 (Thu) @ 7-9pm Sportsplex
Reply Y to accept, N to decline”
- The user replies with Y or N. If they accept, they are reminded to pay the court fee to the host.
- The user only receives follow-up messages if necessary. For example, if they don’t RSVP in 24 hours, or if the user has not yet paid the court fee.
- Users who are signed up receive a reminder the day prior to the game.
The alpha release of this app is live, with 50+ active users. There isn’t enough data to share quantitative results at this point, but it’s gotten a lot of positive feedback so far:
- The response rate is high (66-95% of invited users respond)
- Users respond faster to SMS sign-ups than Discord sign-ups
- 100% of users have paid the court fee by the deadline
- People who previously declined to join the Discord community are using the SlimesVB app
- 100% of users who began onboarding successfully completed it
In addition to the player-facing metrics that I’m already tracking, my next goal is to improve the experience for hosting users by streamlining the process of organizing games in the admin dashboard.