MITURF is a Toronto-based startup, aiming to connect people who enjoy an active lifestyle with sporting venues.
Design
Discovery Workshop, Prototyping, UX/UI, Illustrations, Design system
Quality Assurance
Unit Testing, Performance Testing, System Testing, Compatibility Testing
Location
Toronto, Canada
Web Development
JavaScript, React.js, Ruby on Rails
Dev Ops
Discovery Workshop, Prototyping
Length
May 2015 – too long
1/
The Brief
HOW THE BALL GOT IN OUR COURT
MITURF was built as a one-stop-shop for booking sporting venues. The idea for this web and app sprouted when its owners realized how hard it can be to organize both jocks and venues. Enter MITURF! Users discover, inquire about and book recreational spaces. Venues keep track of those inquiries and bookings through their dashboards. Kind of like the Airbnb of sporting spaces but without the seaside views, unfortunately.
After starting Ars Futura and getting our feet wet, MITURF was one of our first more complex projects. Tasked with everything from product design and development to custom development of the entire platform, we had our work cut out. But, we hit the ground running.
2/
The Front Stage
The user story across the board
The public area is created to help users discover all recreational venues nearby. A summer body is now just a few clicks away.
Discover
Find different public and private venues in your city easily! The spaces are shown on the front page, depending on their popularity. Mark your favorite venues with a 💚 so you can easily spot them again.
Inquire and Book
Any questions you might have can be answered by sending an inquiry to the venue of your choice. Once everything is clear, you can go on and turn your inquiry into a booking.
Filter
Use filters to narrow down the results. Choose the activity, location, date, and number of people to limit the search. Extra filters include price range, type of environment, excluding public spaces and even the type of surface you wish to use. No Instagram filters though, sorry.
Enjoy!
The space is now all yours! Transfer your booking into the real world, spend some time being active, getting your heart rate up and having fun.
3/
For Venues
BEHIND THE SCENES
The provider area is made for venue owners and their employees. We wanted to make sure going through messages and adjusting profiles is easy peasy lemon squeezy, to help them be more productive. They can access the app from different devices, review inquiries and bookings, keep track of the space occupancy and payments. Venues can spice up their profiles by setting terms, hours and rules, adding photos, and determining the type of activities they allow.
MITURF makes sure they can rest easy. Users are verified, the payment is collected immediately and made available to the venue after the customer completes their booking. From our standpoint, this meant adding custom payment methods as well as working and reservation hours for every platform.
Rich and customizable venue profile options
Smart calendar that prevents double booking
Track bookings and inquiries from other sources
Payments are collected beforehand from verified users
Multiple payment methods, including cash
4/
Takeaway #1
MVP IS NOT Maximum Viable Product
A minimum viable product (MVP) is a product with just enough features to satisfy early customers and to provide feedback for future development. Deciding which features to cut from your MVP and which ones to keep is never easy.
MITURF launched after two years in development with a feature-packed website, provider administration portal, an internal administration dashboard, and an iOS app. We probably didn’t need all of those. As they say, hindsight is 20-20.
I think we could have launched sooner. With MITURF, we learned a lot of valuable lessons on gathering feedback and prioritizing common user needs. We realized that “If it had just one feature before the launch, people would love it more” is not something that is true for most products.
— Ivan Božić, CEO of Ars Futura
5/
Takeaway #2
DAVID BOWIES – CHANGES.MP3
With MITURF, we quickly grasped that while building a complex product with a lot of moving parts — things change. And they change often. A feature might go through a few rounds of design, development and user testing before actually settling down into what the customers might see.
We redesigned the profile pages on MITURF a few times. Rewrote the Smart Calendar twice. Don’t even get us started on the homepage. What we learned was that coming back and taking another stab at something you thought was good — can make that thing great ✨.
“
Ars Futura blew me away by understanding what the core problems we were trying to address were. You can really put your trust in their knowledge and expertise. The team went above and beyond their contract.“
Andres Pareja
CEO @ MITURF
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