BassForce App

BassForce® puts the expertise of the greatest bass anglers of all time right at your fingertips. Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned tournament veteran, the app helps you elevate your skill to the next level.

About

The Product

A group of tournament bass fishing’s greatest minds have collaborated to introduce a powerful new app called BassForce, a virtual command center that interprets existing conditions to provide real time solutions to on-the-spot fishing scenarios.

While BassForce’s technology is called artificial intelligence, there’s nothing artificial about the vast knowledge from which the application software pulls to benefit anglers of all skill levels.

The BassForce app is now available on the Apple Store.

 

My Role

This was a moonlighting project (on the side of my normal day job) and I worked closely with the product and engineering leads as well as the founder/pro-angler Alton Jones, to deliver the initial release of the app.

I lead the UX Research, Product Design and manage the work of a very talented illustrator.

I used a 3-step process:

  1. Identifying the problem to solve (discovery)

  2. Exploration (from broad to narrow)

  3. Validate solutions (testing with users)

 

Product Goal

  • Bring angler’s with exclusive professional angling secrets to help them catch more fish (Over 90% of all lures purchased never get wet)

  • Incentivize users to upgrade to Basic or Premium plans to get access to all pro tips.

 

Discovery

 

Audience

People who like recreational bass fishing and hunting, mostly men but also some women. They mostly live in the country, near the lake, and just lives in the open space away from the city.

Anglers these days won’t hop on the boat without having their smartphone with them. That’s due in part to them needing to prove the size of the catch to their friends on social media, but also because of the way technology can help them find and catch fish. Fishing apps have become a staple for some of the more successful modern day anglers.

 

Primary User Goals

Get pro picks for fishing lures based on mainly entered or current conditions

  • Set and save conditions settings for future references (presets)

  • Compare one pro recommendation against another

  • See which lure categories were the most popular by pro

  • Buy lures that are more effective to catch fish

 

Competitors

Key competitors include Fishing Points, FishBrain, FishAngler, ProAngler and Bassforecast.

 

Exploration

 

Designing IA

BassForce_IA.png
 

Conditions view: structure early thinking

 

Conditions

Comps_Conditions.png
 

Pros, Pro Picks and Plans

Comps_Pros_Picks_Plans.png

Outcome

 

As a result of the first release:

  1. Anglers shared that the app tools considerably helps them to shorten the time to catch fish.

  2. Anglers were getting lure suggestions they never would have thought to use — and they got surprised how well they worked.

  3. Bass fishing is a mental game and the app has significantly boosted anglers confidence.

  4. Our team had to start planning for a ‘light version’ of the Conditions view that is not too graphics heavy, considering older iPhones performance and environments with low connectivity.

  5. We learned that users want the ability to create a ‘Shopping List’ with all their Lure choices in one place.

  6. Some workflows in the app need to be optimized to allow a quick and easy way to complete similar tasks starting from different entry points

  7. We realized that we need to put a lot more thought into push notifications as an external trigger to help with product adoption.

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