Carv

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Designing the world's most advanced skiing app and wearable alongside two-time Olympic Gold medalist, Ted Ligety.

Completion Date

May 2023

Designing Carv's most powerful mode yet

The Carv app offers 20 ski modes aimed at enhancing various aspects of skiing, but they suffer from low usage due to poor user experience and a lack of skill integration. Our challenge was to develop a groundbreaking skiing mode based on Ted Ligety's technique, intended to elevate skiers' abilities. This mode needed to cater to users across all skill levels, from beginners to experts, while also being enjoyable, premium, and striking the right balance between challenge and achievability, with a key focus on fostering motivation for sustained user engagement.

The development of this mode served as a growth strategy as well as a retention tool with the aim of it becoming Carv’s most popular mode yet.

Kicking off the process with initial research, stakeholder engagement and user personas

What stakeholders had already established
In September 2022, our Head of Product, Alex, along with Data Scientists and a Product Manager, dissected Ted Ligety's signature turn technique, aiming to enhance skiers' edge angle and overall skiing abilities. The brief tasked us with creating an engaging experience where users progressively mastered fundamental skills of Ted's technique. The concept of the Dynamic Leveller, proposed by the Lead Data Scientist, Charlie, and PM, Dave, was suggested, allowing skiers to assess their skills at the start of each session and receive personalised recommendations. From here you could either 'Train with Ted' or 'Challenge Ted'. Whether this was a valuable addition to the mode remained to be validated.

Obsessing over our user personas
Obsessing over user personas, I aimed to design "Ted Mode" to cater specifically to users like the 'Mountain Guide' and 'Alpine Adventurer,' in order to remain fun but challenging enough.

Researching gamification psychology
Drawing inspiration from other sports and educational products such as Duolingo and Peloton's Lane-Break, I embarked on market research to inform our approach, ensuring our design incorporated elements of achievement-based rewards and game psychology.

Designing the initial concepts and navigating user and stakeholder challenges

Low-fidelity concepts and low-hanging fruit
After researching various products, I developed design concepts for the skiing mode, considering options like building up metrics and unlocking challenge levels, drawing inspiration from Duolingo's pathway concept. Presenting these ideas to the team, we discussed the need for users to meet certain metric levels before accessing higher challenges. Additionally, we clarified the mode's positioning, agreeing it should surpass existing Carv modes and function as a game rather than purely educational.

Testing told us otherwise
Conducting user interviews to test the concept of "Ski like an Olympian" and different design options, feedback indicated a preference for a sequential progression system, which users found more engaging and focused. Consequently, we abandoned the initial idea of the "Dynamic Leveller" in favour of a linear path. Users also expressed confusion regarding the distinction between training and challenge modes, leading to a decision to streamline the game's structure for efficiency and clarity.

Finally, insights from users and discussions with the team and Ted Ligety emphasised the importance of mastering one metric before progressing, prompting adjustments to the game structure to align with effective coaching methodologies.

Updated designs and preparing for on-snow testing

Improving the designs based on user feedback
With the UX finalised, my focus shifted to refining designs for on-snow user testing in Austria. This involved perfecting the main map view, enhancing the recording screen, and developing features to educate users on passing levels and general gameplay. Given the time constraints, I prioritized redesigning Carv's existing recording screen to display individual metric scores for previous runs and incorporate video/gif tips for intervention. After testing six design combinations, two designs stood out, featuring target ring designs for a clear metric hierarchy.

Developing a premium UI
To bring the levels screen to life, I initially studied UI elements from other skiing games but realized the need for a unique approach. While exploring badge collection ideas, user feedback emphasized the need for a more premium design aesthetic. This led to redesigning badges, introducing alternative terrains, and refining visual elements like the racing line and tree designs. Users also expressed a desire to view recorded scores for each level, prompting the addition of tappable callouts for level details and retry options.

Final testing and updating the designs

Testing on-snow is invaluable!
On-snow user testing in Austria proved invaluable, with positive feedback indicating that the new mode was preferred over existing Carv modes. Users expressed a willingness to spend a significant portion (60-70%) of their skiing day in the new mode. Insights gathered from testing highlighted areas for improvement, including audio tips, bug fixes, and reassessment features, guiding further development efforts.

Winning Gold!

After months of meticulous design iterations, prototype testing, and user feedback sessions, Train with an Olympian, our most powerful mode yet, was finally complete.

The community loved it, we were on track to hit our OKR and we even made the news!
The positive reception from our community, both online and on the slopes, affirmed its potential to become Carv's most impressive feature, aligning with our OKRs. Securing a feature in the Independent further solidified its impact.

Shout out to my awesome team
Despite facing time constraints and the challenges of setting up metric tracking in time our team's dedication and collaborative effort gave for a really successful outcome. It was by no means an easy feature to build but it was a great challenge and a lot of fun. Shout out to the team for their incredible effort all round and for building an awesome feature with real impact.

More features I designed at Carv

I was fortunate to work on many projects during my time with Carv. More than that, I was often able to take projects the entire way through the design cycle from research and ideation all the way through to build, data analysis and iterations.

Coach's Recommendation

I designed a feature which delivers users the right tips and advice at the right time, based on previous performance.

Groups & Social

I designed Carv's groups feature. Users can create a public or private group, invite friends, find each other on the map, and compete on stats (still to be built).

Referral Scheme

Along with the Product Manager, we designed Carv's in-app referral scheme offering users special rewards for referrals.

Season In Review

Similar to Spotify Wraps, I designed Carv's Season in Review which was highly engaged with and shared throughout the community.

First Time User Experience

I carried out observational studies on snow and designed new FTUE flows to optimise a users first time using Carv.

Session Review & NPS

We designed an end-of-session review and NPS trigger to track user satisfaction and NPS at the end of Day 4.

Setup & Disconnections

We continuously tried to optimise our setup flow and reduce disconnection issues - the primary reason for detractors.

Deliverables

Working in the Product team at Carv as the only full time designer, I was responsible for the research, design, testing and measuring of a variety of features that sat between our two product cohorts; Growth and Coaching. I worked on multiple features during my time there and have chosen to highlight our design process for one of us most interest features, 'Train with an Olympian'

Design Team

Alex Jackson - Head of Product, Jaspar Law - Senior PM, Dave Jenkins - Senior PM, Jack Morris - Senior Developer, Sam Dodd-Noble - Product Designer

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