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Show HN: Sporty – An app for creating and joining sports activities nearby

sportyapp.com

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Re: Show HN: Sporty – An app for creating and joining sports activities nearby

#11

Post by rymohr »

beatboxrevival wrote: post #4

Some serious usability issues with anti-patterns. - Why navigation bar on bottom of screen? - Sometimes close is in left, sometimes on bottom. Pick one. - Overusing the blurred background pattern. Use it sparingly to provide context, or layering. - 3 dots icon is sharing? - No search for finding activities - When you tap a sport, it spawns multiple view controllers. Leads to crashing the app.

I personally like the navigation bar at the bottom. It's a natural resting place for your thumb and a good call if this is one of the main menus.

I like the consistent use of blurred backgrounds too. However on the sports scroll I'd wait until the scroll has settled to change the background image -- when you're scrolling quickly through the list it can cause the app to stutter.

Great work overall! Your app is beautiful.

Re: Show HN: Sporty – An app for creating and joining sports activities nearby

#12

Post by matmik »

beatboxrevival wrote: post #4

Some serious usability issues with anti-patterns. - Why navigation bar on bottom of screen? - Sometimes close is in left, sometimes on bottom. Pick one. - Overusing the blurred background pattern. Use it sparingly to provide context, or layering. - 3 dots icon is sharing? - No search for finding activities - When you tap a sport, it spawns multiple view controllers. Leads to crashing the app.

Good feedback, thank you! This is only our first version, and will absolutely take this back to the team.

Re: Show HN: Sporty – An app for creating and joining sports activities nearby

#13

Post by matmik »

rymohr wrote: post #11
beatboxrevival wrote: post #4

Some serious usability issues with anti-patterns. - Why navigation bar on bottom of screen? - Sometimes close is in left, sometimes on bottom. Pick one. - Overusing the blurred background pattern. Use it sparingly to provide context, or layering. - 3 dots icon is sharing? - No search for finding activities - When you tap a sport, it spawns multiple view controllers. Leads to crashing the app.

I personally like the navigation bar at the bottom. It's a natural resting place for your thumb and a good call if this is one of the main menus. I like the consistent use of blurred backgrounds too. However on the sports scroll I'd wait until the scroll has settled to change the background image -- when you're scrolling quickly through the list it can cause the app to stutter. Great work overall! Your app is beautif…

Thanks a bunch! We really like the bottom placement for navigation as well as it's a small hassle to always reach the very top to go to a different section.

You're 100% right on the sports scroller. Will improve this greatly in the future and try to get it really silky smooth. Actually using Path's FastImageCache in today's version. https://github.com/path/FastImageCache

Re: Show HN: Sporty – An app for creating and joining sports activities nearby

#14

Post by streptomycin »

I just moved a few days ago and I would love an easier way of finding where to play basketball than calling every gym in town and asking tons of people for tips, which is what I started doing earlier today. I've also seen how the friction in this process makes lots of people simply stop playing basketball after they move away from their home town or lose easy access to a college gym, so the problem you're trying to solve is both real and important (and extremely difficult, of course).

But... I don't have an iPhone. Does it make sense to leave most people out, even for an initial launch? Especially since your biggest challenge will be getting critical mass in different locations.

Re: Show HN: Sporty – An app for creating and joining sports activities nearby

#15

Post by johnnyio »

For soccer, do you know Jogabo app? Why don't you partner on specific sport community apps intead of making all sports in the same time with Sporty? It will be harder to have a critical mass for all kind of sports and avoiding the chicken and egg problem.... PS : Do you really think everybody can/like play at amateur/occasional level more than 1 or 2 sports?

Re: Show HN: Sporty – An app for creating and joining sports activities nearby

#16

Post by avalaunch »

Congrats on shipping! That's an awesome achievement.

You'll probably run into the chicken/egg problem of launching an app that requires network effects. One way to solve that that I think would work good here is to provide ancillary benefits to installing and using your app over the competitors (meetup). For example, some stat tracking capabilities might be a great differentiator that would hopefully motivate those with pre-existing leagues to install and use your app.

Re: Show HN: Sporty – An app for creating and joining sports activities nearby

#17

Post by matmik »

euphemize wrote: post #8

Downloaded the app, first screens look good. I would definitely use something like this, living near a huge park in a big city, and being very active. However: - I don't have Facebook, how do I create an account? - Do you really, really need accounts at all? And if you do, can't you at least just show me activities happening around me, and let me sign up later? I'd love to give more feedback but I'm stuck outside you…

Really sorry about that! We knew Facebook would put some people off, but it did two things for us; - We could outsource our login system - As we're going to have a chicken and egg problem, we wanted this to be really great with your existing facebook graph, so that people will be auto friends etc.

Will absolutely implement self login and twitter connect in future updates.

Re: Show HN: Sporty – An app for creating and joining sports activities nearby

#18

Post by matmik »

johnnyio wrote: post #15

For soccer, do you know Jogabo app? Why don't you partner on specific sport community apps intead of making all sports in the same time with Sporty? It will be harder to have a critical mass for all kind of sports and avoiding the chicken and egg problem.... PS : Do you really think everybody can/like play at amateur/occasional level more than 1 or 2 sports?

I haven't heard of Jogabo, but will be sure to check it out. Someone else here also mentioned it.

Yeah, I do think people could enjoy more than one or two sports, especially for the occasional level. E.g. soccer and basketball regularly, and then perhaps something like running and volleyball a few times a month or something.

We have no idea though, will be interesting to see the data after a month.

Re: Show HN: Sporty – An app for creating and joining sports activities nearby

#19

Post by dwg »

matmik wrote: post #2

This is launch day and I'm absolutely thrilled to get it out into the wild! Appreciate any and all feedback! :)

I was searching for an app exactly like this a few weeks ago. Super glad someone else built it so I don't have to. I think the biggest values I hope to get out of this are: (a) coordination of getting the activity together so that I don't have to deal with flakey friends and (b) connecting me to strangers who also want to play so that I can get a game together even when friends are out of town or don't want to play (I always seems to have more energy than they do). Looking forward to trying this out!

Re: Show HN: Sporty – An app for creating and joining sports activities nearby

#20

Post by pawelrychlik »

matmik wrote: post #6
heyheyhey wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you solving the chicken and the egg problem that plagues most location-based apps? For example, I'm in multiple FB groups for playing pick-up in my area and see apps like Jogabo mentioned every now and then yet it never seems to gain traction and people just resort to posting on FB.

It's a tough problem – no doubt about it. In v1, as we expect your nearby network to be quite small, we've focused heavily on your existing friends network (from facebook) and are trying to make that experience as good as possible. Inviting them, organising the events, etc. In the past, just like you, we used facebook groups and/or messages/chats back and fourth to friends. Hopefully the app will be good enough for p…

Chicken & egg. I once started with a similar idea - meeting sport buddies - but on a country scale. I found it very hard to gain enough traction for people to actually be able to meet each other.

Because.... what value does it bring for Joe who's living in SF, that Jane from NY wants to go for a work-out? I think "importing" events from other sites is one option to get things going (still - quite a lot of effort). Other idea - is to start locally, run a big ad campaign, get in touch with sport centers, etc, then "conquer" other cities, one by one.

Good luck! :)

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