AthletesTogether • Co-Founder • Lead Product Designer
Overview
During my time as a division 1 athlete, I noticed the severe lack of resources that are accessible to student-athletes when it comes to mental health. Most universities have a sports therapist or two, but schedules are chaotic and the majority of students don’t utilize resources like this. AthletesTogether is an iOS application that serves as a platform for student-athletes to talk about mental health, share resources, and build relationships. The app is a combination of a social media application and a resource database, where users create a profile, meet people with similar backgrounds and experiences, and use the platform to discuss mental health in various ways.
Unfortunately, there is a massive stigma that surrounds mental health and athletes in our culture. Our platform allows athletes to hurdle that stigma as it fosters a population of people who want to talk about their challenges with someone who is also experiencing the pressures of being a student-athlete.
I am the co-founder of AthletesTogether and am solely designing the application using primarily Figma.
John Armistead
Co-Founder
Product Designer
Product Manager
Lucas Ragen
Co-Founder
Before conducting our own research, we compiled a list of secondary references that contain key statistics that validate our experience as student-athletes. This was an important step because it gave us tangible results from various case studies and professional research that supported our intuition. Through this process, we found the following verified results:
• According to a 2017 study by the National College Athletic Association, 30% of about 200,000 student-athletes reported feeling depressed. 50% also claimed to have experienced overwhelming anxiety, and this information is six years out of date.
• Student-athletes report higher levels of negative emotional states than non-student-athlete adolescents.
30% of college athletes self-reported that they had been “intractably overwhelmed during the past month,” an increase from the results of the same survey five years earlier, per a 2015 survey by the NCAA.
• 33% of all college students experience significant symptoms of depression, anxiety or other mental health conditions. Among that group, 30% seek help. But for college athletes with mental health conditions, only 10% do. Among professional athletes, data shows that up to 35% of elite athletes suffer from a mental health crisis which may manifest as stress, eating disorders, burnout, or depression and anxiety.
• While depression and anxiety have been found to be significant predictors of a lower grade-point average and poor athletics performance, they’re also highly correlated with other risky behaviors, including suicide.
• Most schools mental health services are understaffed, saying that when you only have 1 or 2 staff when dealing with 300-500 student-athletes “is not a positive ratio”.
College student-athletes are typically busy individuals with the daily responsibility of balancing their academics with their athletic commitments. Therefore, most student-athletes are organized and are good at time management. Despite these skills, they do not have a lot of extra time in their days, so they are particular about how they spend their free time. This requires them to be fairly decisive because they do not have the time to waste on purchasing decisions. Being part of a team, they work well with others and embrace comradery. In addition, most student-athletes are not working full-time jobs while competing, which suggests that they do not have a lot of discretionary money to spend.
In our survey that we conducted, we asked 100 student-athletes to answer various questions concerning mental health.
I have also worked on the following documents to help us understand all phases of our business.
• Market Validation Worksheet
• Messaging and Direction Worksheet
Although there are so many different situations, experiences, and people, we believe that there are three main types of student-athletes that will benefit from our application. The users fall into (but not constrained to) these general behaviors and situations. Creating these personas helped us build specific features to directly address their pain points.
Sports performance is a common contributor to poor mental health. Many athletes have a direct relationship when it comes to on-field and off-field performance. This is a very volatile lifestyle and can quickly lead to poor mental health if not properly monitored and maintained. Sports injuries are quite literally part of the experience; every athlete we interviewed has dealt with an injury in some capacity during their career. Injuries often lead to poor mental health because a major part of the student-athlete’s identity is suddenly halted. Feelings of self deprecation and insignificance are commonly attributed to sports injuries. Lastly, the stresses of general life in a student-athlete are another reason to be proactive with mental health. As aforementioned, student-athlete daily schedules are chaotic, repetitive, and stressful. These days can have a serious toll on mental (and physical) health. Maintaining both of those is the key to success over these long seasons.
My design process followed the Design Thinking system, where I used non-linear and iterative approach to understand users and creative innovative solutions. Our primary and secondary research helped us understand the users on a personal level by empathizing with them. We then transitioned into the “defining” and “ideate” process, where we used divergent and convergent thinking to organize our thoughts.
Our ideas ranged from telehealth to meditation applications, but we ended up on a social media application that can connect users but also be a hub of resources that are publicly accessible. Our research supports that student-athletes need a resource that is easily accessible, has a low barrier of entry, and multifaceted.
Brainstorming
We started brainstorming key features and pages that the application would contain using FigJam boards. We continuously referenced our problem statement while brainstorming these features to ensure that we were maintaining a line of thinking that was consistent with our user needs. Part of our process is shown in the graphics below:
After brainstorming, we were able to develop low to mid fidelity wireframes that would be the base of our application design. We focused on wireframing the Feed, Connect, and Profile pages. In these wireframes, we implemented the features that we instilled in the brainstorming process. For example, the Feed page has two different feeds that you can toggle between at the top of the screen, “Live Feed” and “Your Feed”. It also has a fairly simple layout where users can scroll to see more posts. The Connect page wireframe contains two main features we designed: connection between athletes and direct messaging. As brainstormed, the connection aspect has a similar approach to LinkedIn connections, utilizing profile pictures and minimalist descriptions to avoid clutter and information overload. The bottom half of the wireframe shows how the direct messaging tool would look and how it is incorporated into the Connect page. Lastly, The profile page continues the minimalist theme with just a profile picture and simple biography on the top half, with the “My Posts” and “My Resources” toggle options on the lower half of the screen. The resources tab, as shown in the wireframe, can contain videos, articles, or other mediums that can redirect away from the application. This gives the user to input as many and as diverse of resources that they choose - a unique quality of the app.
The application has been iterated upon hundreds of times over the last few months, so our initial idea has been ironed out into a user-driven product that is full of features that student-athletes want.
Without giving too much detail (for development and IP reasons), AthletesTogether pivoted away from the connection aspect for liability, privacy, usability, and user desirability concerns. This, in turn, affects our feed feature. Our focus moving forward is building features that users want, which has been simplified into courses, personal development habit tracking, curated and real-time addressed resources, and many more. These new features have been tested and built out since these pivot decisions were made (see below for some details).
AthletesTogether has successfully partnered with several companies during the incubator and accelerator programs - these companies will be vital in the resource building, as well as sales and go-to-market operations.
