Streamlining Badminton Tournament Setup

As part of the 2025 Dubstech Protothon, my team and I created RallyUP, a mobile-first app helping badminton clubs to streamline tournament management. With RallyUP, organizers can create brackets in minutes, track real-time scores, manage players, and share and review historical data, enhancing efficiency and community engagement.

I led our user research, conducting a competitive analysis and guerrilla user observations through Reddit and other online platforms. I was also directly responsible for our Create a Tournament flow, which had over 20 screens.

ENTERPRISE TRACK

Original Problem Statement

Local badminton clubs use manual methods like spreadsheets for tournaments, causing slow setup, errors, and no real-time updates or historical data access, frustrating organizers and players.

Our Solution

My team quickly ideated a solution with four key features: A mobile app that would allow badminton clubs to create and share tournaments easily, so all participants have access to relevant and timely info.

My Goals

While my teammates focused on real-time match scoring and player profiles and performance data, I focused on two primary goals:

Research

Even though we had a limited amount of time, I still prioritized user research to ensure that our solution was grounded in real user context. I conducted a competitive analysis of existing apps and explored badminton forums to see the pain points tournament organizers discussed most.

Competitive Analysis

Badminton Scoring Apps

Competitive Analysis

Reclub Tournament Creation

Conversation Mining

r/Badminton

Organizers were struggling to create matchups particularly when it came to beginners or groups with high variation in skill level.

No two organizers had the same technique, which meant that I had to maximize flexibility by providing random, seeded, and curated matchups.

Tournament Creation

Based on my research, I maximized flexibility by creating two tournament types and three bracket options while still keeping each tournament flow to three main screens. I also designed a summary screen where organizers can review all settings before publishing the tournament.

Flexible Tournaments

2 Types of Tournaments

Player Selection

• See everyone’s win rate and experience level at a glance
• Find the right players every time with search and inclusive filtering options

Customizable Brackets

3 Ways to Create Brackets

One-Off Games

Friendly Matches

• Players and organizers can score and track single game results without creating a tournament
• Simply select match type, create pairings with easy drag and drop, and start playing in seconds

Why This Works

By offering maximum customization, RallyUP can be used by clubs of all sizes for all types of tournaments

Especially with large tournaments, my research showed that organizers may not want to manually pair people one-by-one, but random generators often create uneven matchups when the group has a large range of experiences.

Final Prototype

My final flows provides tournament organizers with a clean, intuitive interface with filterable player lists and drag-and-drop bracket creation.

Results

After a whirlwind of a day (& very little sleep), my team received a special mention for our work on RallyUP.

The judges were impressed by our strong user flow and feature planning in addition to our clear and effective final presentation.

Reflection

This was my first hackathon, and while I really enjoyed the experience, I did feel a bit out of my comfort zone designing screens rapidly with limited user context and no usability testing.

What Worked:

I built confidence in my rapid prototyping and Figma skills. I was able to create prototypes of three separate flows (two tournament types + friendly matches) with custom components in about 12 hours of work time.

Some research is better than none at all. Diving into club websites and Reddit threads helped me understand the problem better, which led to a finished product that was tailored to badminton club organizers’ unique needs.

What I’d Do Differently:

More Interaction Design. While it was not required of us, I would have liked to work on my prototype a bit more to help show my vision for what the final product would have looked like. If I had access to Figma Make at the time, I think that might have been a fun direction to sacrifice even more sleep to.

Design System Instead of UI Kit. My team agreed beforehand to use Apple’s Design Resources to keep our designs cohesive. However, I found it difficult to use Apple’s kit in my designs. Without customization, our screens looked generic, and I had to build several custom components. Choosing a design system before the hackathon started instead would have given us a stronger brand identity and more cohesion between our designs from the start.