Find Your Game. Find Your Squad.

Rally is a mobile app for casual sports players who spend more time organising than actually playing. Finding people at the right skill level, coordinating schedules, booking venues, and recovering from last-minute cancellations – all of that overhead was being managed through WhatsApp and Telegram group chats. It worked, until it didn't.

The project started with that coordination problem and ended with a product that addresses all three layers of it: helping players find others at the right skill level, making it easy to join or form groups nearby, and building in a recovery mechanism for when plans fall apart at the last minute.

The most critical feature – Auto-Matching – failed 4 out of 5 users in the first usability test, not because the concept was wrong, but because the execution felt stressful. The redesign fixed that. The Search feature failed because users expected to find games, not players. Rather than patch it, the feature was rebuilt entirely into something more useful.

Organising a casual sports session sounds simple. In practice, it rarely is. People who want to play have to find others at a similar skill level, coordinate schedules across a group, secure a venue, and hope nobody cancels last minute. Most people were managing all of this through WhatsApp and Telegram – a workable solution until it wasn't.

The fragility of informal group coordination meant a single cancellation could unravel an entire session. With no easy way to find a replacement quickly, the effort everyone else had put in – booking a court, arranging transport, clearing their schedule – was simply wasted.

The HMW gave the project its direction. But to design the right solution, the team first needed to understand exactly how people coped today – and why those methods kept failing them.

User interviews were conducted to understand how people currently organise casual sports — what works, what breaks down, and what they wish existed. The conversations quickly revealed that the coordination problem was far more emotionally loaded than it might appear on the surface.

Each feature in Rally was designed in direct response to something the research surfaced. The goal was never to add features – it was to remove friction at the specific moments users found most painful.

Users needed enough context to decide whether to join before they even asked

Research showed that players cared about skill level and session intensity as much as time and location. Showing up to a highly competitive session expecting a casual kickabout – or vice versa – was a friction point users specifically mentioned. Without the right context upfront, even a well-organised session could feel like a mismatch.

Session creation was designed to capture everything a potential player would need to make that call before they ever sent a message. Skill level, intensity, format, location, and time are all set at the point of creation – so the information is there for anyone considering joining, not buried in a chat thread or relayed through a middleman.

Users needed a way to recover from cancellations without the frantic scramble

When a player drops out last minute, the host faces a familiar problem: a flurry of messages, uncertain replies, and a shrinking window before the session falls apart. Research confirmed users were willing to play with someone new – as long as skill levels matched. That openness was the enabling condition for Auto-Matching to work.

Auto-Matching addresses the HMW question directly. When a player drops out, the host activates it and the app automatically sends replacement requests to skill-matched players in the area, starting with the most trusted contacts (past players rated 4★ or above) and expanding outward if needed. The host stays in control while the app does the heavy lifting – replacing a frantic broadcast with a structured, fast, background process.

The feature was also designed to solve a broader discovery problem: even without a cancellation, Auto-Matching gave hosts a way to fill open spots and expand their regular playing network beyond their existing circle.

Users needed a way to find a game to join – not just to host one

Rally needed to serve two user types equally well: those who want to organise a game, and those who simply want to find one. Research made clear that a significant portion of users were free on a given evening and looking to join something already happening nearby – without the overhead of organising it themselves.

What began as a player-search feature was later reshaped entirely by usability testing into something more useful: Find Open Sessions, with sport quick-filters and a full session detail view. The change wasn't cosmetic. It was a fundamental rethink of what the feature was for.

Three tasks were tested across five users and two of them failed in ways that reshaped the product.

Auto-Matching failed 4 out of 5 – not because the concept was wrong, but because the experience felt stressful

The feature was sound in concept, but its execution was generating the very anxiety it was meant to relieve. A red countdown timer, broadcast terminology like "Wave 1 of 3", and a dense wall of status updates left users overwhelmed. One simply said, "There's a lot going on."

A feature designed to reduce stress can't look stressful. The redesign stripped back the visual language to the app's calm blue-teal palette, replaced "Wave" with "Group", swapped "Broadcasting" for "Finding Players", and added a setup screen explaining how Auto-Matching works before users ever activated it.

The Search feature failed in the most revealing way of all

Four out of five users went to Search expecting to find games to join – not players to connect with, which is what it had been built for. This wasn't a labelling problem that better copy could fix. It was a fundamental misalignment between what the feature did and what users instinctively reached for it to do.

So rather than patch it, the feature was rethought entirely: redesigned from player-search into Find Open Sessions, with sport quick-filters and a full session detail view. The failure didn't just get fixed – it pointed to what the feature should have been all along.

Beyond the three core tested flows, an additional feature was designed to support the longer-term relationship users build with the app over time.

Player profiles are the trust layer that makes Auto-Matching work. When a user considers accepting a match with someone new, the profile gives them the skill level, rating, and session history they need to say yes with confidence.

Rally was built around a problem that sounds trivial until it happens to you: you've booked a court, coordinated schedules, and then someone cancels an hour before. The stress of that moment – and the absence of any quick, reliable way to recover from it – was the thread that ran through every user interview and shaped every design decision.

The back-and-forth, the follow-ups, the last-minute scrambles – every part of that experience drains energy before a single point is played. Rally was designed with that mental load in mind. By taking the coordination burden off the players, it gives them the confidence that when something goes wrong, the game doesn't have to.