Sherpa.
An AI-powered sports and performance journaling app designed to help athletes effectively maximize their practice. With specially crafted journaling prompts and AI analysis, Sherpa provides actionable, targeted, and supportive feedback to help athletes stay motivated and excel at their sport more efficiently.
Project type: End-to-End Mobile Application
Duration: 5 weeks
Team: 2 Co-founders, 1 Developer, and 1 Project Manager
Roles: UX Design, UX Research, Visual Design, Branding
Gimme the TLDR.
Insights > Assumptions
Sherpa is an early-stage startup created by passionate athletes aiming to enhance their skills through introspective journaling. However, the stakeholders planned to develop a minimum viable product (MVP) on an assumption without any research, leaving them open to building something that doesn’t have wider product-market fit.
They assumed:
Athletes don’t journal to improve their athletic performance because reviewing those entries is too time consuming.
I had to:
Ensure Sherpa avoided a rabbit hole and design an MVP of real value to actual users, with research-backed insights in mind.
Turns out, spending time reviewing journal entries was not the primary pain point at all!
User interviews revealed that athletes tend to abandon journaling altogether because the way they journaled left them feeling discouraged and depressed for two reasons:
1 - They mostly wrote about things they did poorly.
2 - Journaling doesn’t give feedback, let alone good feedback.
To avoid the biased, unhelpful, emotionally negative feedback loop from journaling, most athletes chose not to journal at all. Instead, they tracked their performance in unreliable ways, like taking mental notes, which slowed down their improvement.
How do you get people to take on journaling, and promise them a motivating experience, and noticeable performance improvement results?
Through collaborations and regular meetings with stakeholders, I designed Sherpa’s MVP - a guided journaling app that forced users to constructively critique themselves by beginning and ending each journal entry with positives from their sessions, so as not to leave a bad taste in their mouths when they finished reflecting. Additionally, AI was thoughtfully engineered to analyze journal entries for you, and provide actionable critique in the same supportive structure.
Scroll for Process
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Scroll for Process *
Research
Houston, we think we have a problem:
In order to build something of value that people will pay to use, you have to know what the people value!
You have to ask:
How do athletes currently reflect on their practices? What have they stopped doing? What was “good” feedback?
And most of all: WHY?
Research Goal
How do people currently capture, reflect, and identify areas of improvement so that we can build a better MVP of value that will entice people to pay for the service?
I interviewed ambitious, performance driven athletes aged 18-45, that are not improving as efficiently as they want to be, do not have a personal coach, and seek personalized feedback in order to improve their athletic skill.
What was really preventing athletes from journaling?
Research refuted Sherpa’s hypothesis.
1 - The lack of good feedback:
4/5 participants indicated that effective feedback should be specific and actionable, allowing them to focus on it in their next practice. This feedback stems from both subjective and objective reflection, helping them avoid wasting time on ineffective strategies. Journaling alone did not provide this type of feedback, leading participants to either discard it completely or alter their approach.
2 - Too easy to focus on negative feedback:
People often link journaling to expressing negative feelings, which can be emotionally draining and lead to biased insights, hindering an athlete's mental performance. As a result, it tends to be neither enjoyable nor productive for self-improvement.
Why would an athlete waste precious time journaling if they end up feeling worse about themselves than when they started and if it’s not providing any helpful feedback?
Houston, we have a research-backed problem:
How might we help athletes efficiently reflect on their performance between practices and competitions to receive targeted, motivating feedback that drives improvement?
Finding marketplace opportunities:
After analyzing other available sports psychology platforms, mental health journaling apps, and physical fitness apps, the team and I determined Sherpa’s product can fill these gaps in the current market:
Establishing project goals
Sherpa’s product has to:
Track progress in an encouraging way
Provide personalized actionable feedback
Make journaling fun
Enable journaling to become habit
Be visually engaging and easy to use
MVP must-haves:
Journal entry with guided prompts. Letting users free-write is too risky.
AI insights that provide feedback
Sketching Solutions
To meet the stakeholders' timeline for a scrappy MVP, we prioritized lean testing and key changes.
After three rounds of low-fidelity iterations and meetings, we identified and resolved confusing, clunky, or unnecessary elements, while staying within our technical and financial limits with AI.
Task flows and site mapping were also worked out while sketching.
Branding
Sherpa’s top 3 brand values are to encourage, to empower, and to motivate.
Visually, I wanted Sherpa to feel at home in an athletic space, where it could get a drink with the likes of Nike and feel comfortable.
In my research, a theme emerged: desaturated black, white, and greys; bold san serifs; saturated accents; energetic textures; and italicized, sharp, angular type evoking movement.
Sherpa’s accent color is green, representing vitality, strength, and positivity, while the neon quality evokes alertness and energy.
Hi-Fi’s & iterations
Testing the HiFi and prioritizing iterations
After translating the branding to the design, I tested the product with peers and used the feedback to prioritize critical changes, making the app’s purpose clearer and easier to use.
Changes to Journal Screen
Streamlining the Insights tab
An easier way to peruse old entries/insights
Handing off the MVP
Finally, it was time for handoff.
Handoff included a blend of custom UI components and Daisy UI components, at the request of the developer.
What’s ahead for Sherpa?
Sherpa is currently building the MVP to test on a wider audience before iterating again on V2 of the product.
Advancements in AI will impact V2
Shortly after handing off the MVP design to Sherpa’s engineer, Open AI’s announced ChatGPT 4o.
Most notably, ChatGPT 4o allows users to converse freely in real-time with AI through verbal chat, image, and video. It can pick up on emotional nuance through verbal and audio cues.
This greatly impacts the guided journaling and feedback capabilities of the product. Users will be able to simulate talking to a personal coach and get immediate feedback on their performance.
Final thoughts
Going through this process, I exercised how to collaborate and communicate with stakeholders to assess tradeoffs - time, effort, and financial - when prioritizing next steps.
I especially reaffirmed how rewarding it is to work as part of a team.
I look forward to seeing Sherpa develop further.
