Dime Basketball App

Turning street basketball into a connected product

Dime began with an ambition larger than helping people find somewhere to play basketball. Its founder, Rhys, saw an opportunity to create a digital home for the social game: a place where players could discover courts, organise sessions, meet other people and build a record of what happened after the final whistle.

The energy behind the idea was clear. The shape of the product was still open.

Social sport already involves a network of informal behaviours. Games are arranged through messages and word of mouth. Local knowledge determines which courts are active. Organisers need to know who is coming, while players want enough context to decide whether a session is right for them. Once a game is over, most of that activity disappears rather than contributing to an ongoing community.

My brief was to turn those scattered moments into one coherent mobile experience. A polished concept alone would not be enough. In a competitive sports-technology market, Dime needed a proposition that potential players could understand, investors could believe in and a future product team could take forward with confidence.

I led the product discovery and UX/UI design through Kanda Colab, taking Dime from an early vision to a tested, high-fidelity prototype spanning more than 100 screens.

Mapping the whole service, not just the app

One of the first substantial pieces of work was a customer journey map that looked well beyond the interface. I followed the experience through eight stages: awareness, consideration, acquisition, onboarding, pre-game preparation, game week, post-game administration, and loyalty and advocacy.

At each stage, the map connected what the customer was doing with what they were trying to achieve, where the interaction took place and how the experience was likely to feel. Beneath that customer view sat the corresponding business goal, measures of success, organisational activity, responsible teams and supporting systems.

The result was closer to an operating blueprint than a conventional screen journey. It showed, for example, that acquisition involved a captain registering, creating a team and inviting friends before each player completed their own profile and payment. Onboarding depended on clear tournament information. Pre-game preparation included matching teams with suitable courts, agreeing a date, confirming availability and communicating the rules. After the game, both teams needed to submit a score, raise any dispute and understand what happened next.

Seeing those moments together changed how I approached the design. A registration form could not be judged only by completion rate if it left a captain chasing the rest of the team. A court recommendation affected scheduling, communication and the likelihood of a game going ahead. Score submission was more than data entry; it fed rankings, progression and any customer-service work required when teams disagreed.

The map also made the emotional shape of the service visible. The most effort sat around registration and coordination, while the highest point was the game itself. The product therefore needed to absorb as much administrative friction as possible around the edges without intruding on the reason everyone was there—to play.

The end-to-end view gave us a shared basis for product and business decisions. It clarified which moments belonged in the app, which depended on timely communication and where Dime's own team would need a process behind the experience. I could then design the interface as the visible part of a complete service instead of asking it to solve every problem by itself.

Customer journey map — eight stages, one service

Finding the reason to return

I began with stakeholder and user interviews, not a predetermined feature list. I wanted to understand how social basketball already worked: how people heard about events, what gave them the confidence to join, what captains needed to coordinate and what might bring a player back after their first game.

The complete journey revealed an important distinction. Finding a court or joining a game might create an initial interaction, but neither was enough on its own to sustain a social product. Dime needed a loop in which each game made the next one easier to enter and more meaningful to join.

That loop connected a small number of essential actions: discover an opportunity, form or join a team, find a place to play, prepare for the game, take part and carry the result into a player profile, community feed and the next stage of competition. Statistics added a sense of progression, while the social layer gave the experience continuity beyond an individual match.

That loop became the product's organising idea. Dime would help a player move naturally from interest to participation, then from participation to progress, sharing and an ongoing place in the community. It gave the features a reason to belong together.

Court discovery — surface, hoops, access

Making the physical court part of the experience

Street basketball is inseparable from place. A court is not simply a pin on a map; it carries practical information, familiarity and a sense of local community. Treating location as a search result alone would have missed much of what makes the game social.

I gave courts a more meaningful role in the product model. Players could search an area, understand the character of a court and see the events connected to it. Details such as the playing surface, number of hoops, whether the court was outdoors and whether it was publicly accessible helped turn an unfamiliar location into a credible place to play.

This created a bridge between discovery and action. A player could move from exploring nearby courts to seeing an upcoming game without having to reconstruct the context elsewhere. For organisers, choosing a known court made an event easier to communicate. For the product, courts provided a persistent structure around activity that would otherwise be temporary.

This also kept Dime grounded in the real world. I did not want the interface to replace the experience of street basketball with another digital destination. Its job was to reduce the friction around getting people onto a court together.

Designing across roles and moments

Every social competition has more than one participant in its coordination. Captains create teams and bring people together. Individual players join, pay and need to know what is expected of them. Opposing teams have to confirm a game and agree the practical details. Dime's own team needs enough structure to resolve disputes and move successful teams into the next phase.

Activity feed — black-and-white foundation, vivid green accents

I used user-flow diagrams to work through those perspectives before developing the visual design. Joining needed to feel lightweight, but creating a game still had to capture the details that prevent confusion: the court, format, time, participating players and whether the session should be visible to the wider community. The design also had to carry a team from registration into confirmation, game day, score submission and whatever came next without making the whole experience feel administrative.

Those flows shaped a clear set of product areas. The activity feed showed basketball as something already happening between real people. Explore and court-finding helped players move beyond the people and places they already knew. The play journey supported creating and joining events, while profiles, results and statistics gave participation a longer memory.

The relationship between those areas mattered more than any individual screen. A court could lead to an event; an event could bring a team together; a completed game could appear as activity, contribute to a player's record and determine progression. Designing those connections made the product feel like one community rather than a collection of utilities.

Giving a broad idea a consistent language

Once the core journeys were established, the work progressed from wireframes into high-fidelity interface design. More than 100 screens were created—not to inflate the scope, but to give the important journeys enough depth to be understood as a real product.

That depth exposed decisions a handful of showcase screens would have hidden. We could follow complete pathways through account and team setup, court search, event creation, confirmation, game activity, results and return. It also let me place the same information in the right context for a captain, an individual player or somebody deciding whether to join.

Visually, the interface balanced the immediacy of street basketball with the clarity expected of a product people would use while arranging real plans. A largely black-and-white foundation kept information direct, while a vivid green created recognisable moments of action and identity. Photography, player avatars, court imagery and map views brought the human and physical sides of the sport into an otherwise restrained system.

The result was energetic without turning every screen into a poster. That restraint was important. Brand could create recognition, but schedules, locations and participation still had to be understood at a glance.

Dime — prototype

Prototyping the complete proposition

I assembled the high-fidelity screens into a connected Figma prototype so Dime could be experienced as a sequence of decisions, not reviewed as a set of static images.

That changed the conversation around the product. Stakeholders could follow the journey from opening the app to finding a court, discovering an event, joining a game and seeing that participation reflected in the wider community. Potential users could respond to how the experience behaved and flowed, rather than only whether they liked its visual style.

User testing then provided a way to challenge the original assumptions while they were still inexpensive to change. Feedback from potential players was used to refine the navigation, interactions and presentation of the core proposition. The prototype made gaps easier to see because people could encounter them in context: at the moment they were deciding where to play, whether to join or what to do next.

Just as importantly, the prototype became a business tool. Dime needed to communicate enough clarity and ambition to support investor conversations before committing to production. A connected experience demonstrated how the concept could work, who it was for and why its different parts belonged together far more convincingly than a feature list or pitch deck could do alone.

The outcome

The engagement transformed Dime from a broad vision for social basketball into a coherent, testable product proposition. Discovery research established the customer journey and core participation loop. The service blueprint connected that experience to Dime's goals, measures and operating responsibilities. User flows made the relationship between courts, teams, games, results and activity explicit. More than 100 high-fidelity screens and a comprehensive prototype gave that thinking a tangible form.

The work resonated with potential users and investors, and helped Dime secure the investment needed to continue towards market. It also left the founder with more than a polished presentation: a shared product model that could guide future conversations, testing and delivery.

For me, the strongest outcome was clarity. Dime did not need to reproduce every part of basketball culture inside an app. It needed to recognise the moments where a digital product could make the real experience easier to enter and more connected over time.

By beginning with the complete player lifecycle—and designing the small transitions between discovery, participation and return—the project gave an ambitious social-sports idea a credible path forward.