Building a Super App for a Sporting Goods Retailer

The retailer shifted from just offering sporting goods to fully facilitating a healthy lifestyle. Now, it helps its clients to travel and monitor their health, do sports and gain insights on healthy living, attend sports events and connect with communities of like-minded people.

Sportmaster researched what other needs its target audience had aside from the goods and launched new services to cover these demands.

The new design is built upon the brand’s signature color palette. We refreshed the colors, made them more saturated and contrasting, which gave a spirited and airy feel to the interface.

The deep blue shade represents assurance, the white makes the interfaces look clean and decluttered, and the bright red catches the eye of the user.

We studied the old interface design and noticed that its elements were inconsistent and oftentimes conflicted with each other. The brand had an uncoordinated approach to its visual language and:

• Designed banners in different styles, causing banner blindness in users.
• Used small typography, which hampered the readability of product names and notifications.
• Implemented annoying ads and push notifications that distracted customers from making purchases.
• Focused on showing brand tags instead of useful product information.

Each visual element was supposed to draw users’ attention, but in the end only distracted customers from what Sportmaster had to offer.

For the new super app, we developed a visual language that represented the dynamic nature of different sports and accentuated the individuality of the people who do them.

As a result, users started to engage with the app more often: banner clickability increased by 65%.

We built an app admin panel that works as a no-code solution, allowing Sportmaster to manually rearrange interface components such as recommendations and banners, without writing extra code.

The modular app grid creates visual order and improves readability, helping users to view relevant offers and effortlessly move through the interface. With the modular grid, Sportmaster can assemble the home screen feed like a construction set:

• Remove any blocks or sections from the admin panel without coding or issuing new releases.
• Experiment with design patterns.
• Test marketing hypotheses.
• Find the options that result in most conversions.

Sportmaster is expanding beyond just a sporting goods store. It develops digital services that facilitate non-product sport needs of its customers.

To make it easier for users to follow the news, work out, and discover sports events, we created useful mini apps and conveniently placed them in one section.

With the integration of services, customers started to spend more time in the app and use it more often.

Driven to become a go-to platform for healthy living, Sportmaster launched several mini apps that help users maintain their healthy habits. We designed the services and helped with their development.

Sportmaster aimed to increase user engagement and help customers develop a new look on the brand. Together, we came up with a mobile game that addresses business challenges as well as entertains users.

Thanks to gamification, one million customers started using the new service section and engaged with the brand for more than shopping.

Apart from the flagship super app, Sportmaster also has mobile applications for other countries and sister companies. To help the retailer grow, we developed the app using modular architecture.

Such an approach saves more time and money than creating mobile applications from scratch. All modules are independent of one another and can function on their own, which allows for a faster development process.

Sportmaster wanted to fill the app with intuitively clear illustrations in its brand style, so that users could understand from the first glance which app section they are visiting. We used the company’s goods as the major inspiration for the illustrations and suggested sports-based metaphors for indicating different states.

We made the illustrations in a flat, minimalistic design to keep user attention on the important interface elements. The illustrations also subtly lead users to target actions: going to the catalog, adding to the cart, or liking an item.

We decluttered the old product card, making it more informative and visually clear.

Product videos in the card help customers see the items from different angles in motion.

Detailed product descriptions give information on manufacturing and item characteristics, helping customers with their choice.

Sportmaster experts provide answers to users’ questions and help customers learn more about the products.

Eventually, users started shopping through the app more often, and the average ticket grew by 15%.

After these updates, the cart abandonment rate decreased, and the sales conversions grew by 12%.