About Focus Shift Films
Focus Shift Films is a media production company. It creates digital content and develops feature scripts and TV projects. One of its short films was nominated for a BAFTA Cymru Award in 2019. It’s now working on an app, Viewfinder For Sports, alongside other projects.
Together with our partners in New York, ViewPark, we’d been looking at creating a digital product that could cater for fans of sports and tourism. There is a lot of money spent on sports tourism, but there are very few products for sports tourists. We wanted to create something which brought tourism and sports together in an engaging way, providing sports fans with unique sport-related content and opportunities when they travel.
To allow us to research the market further, we applied for a £10,000 grant from Clwstwr
Before starting any sort of build, we wanted to explore our market and the product’s potential users, as well as putting some thought into how our product might look and function. We also wanted to consider what sort of content the users might engage with best and how they'd engage with that content. With this knowledge, we hoped to then create a prototype that we could test on our target users.
As part of the Clwstwr programme, PDR ran several introductory workshops
These workshops were helpful; they got us thinking more about the approach we would take and how we could find out more about what our target customers would want. We developed a survey that we sent out to members of our target audience, asking them questions to help us gain usable insights.
Our next step was to look at what already existed
We researched apps that focused on different industries to see what they were doing, making notes on ways they were similar or different to our planned product and identifying anything that we could potentially add to our idea to make it even better.
There wasn’t an existing product that did what we proposed to do in the sports market
There are individual clubs and organisations that have their own app, but nothing like what we envisioned. We wanted our app to work on a city-wide basis, bringing together all the different sports and teams in an area on one app. In Cardiff, which was the first city we wanted to build the app for, we could bring together rugby, football, ice hockey and other sports in the area, which would provide an information point for tourists who are interested in a variety of sports.
We turned to developing some content for our prototype
To showcase all of the sports in the city, we wanted the content on the app to encourage users to move around the city, almost as though the app content could provide a museum-style tour of the history and heritage of sports in the city. This is something we thought could be done by incorporating facts, stories and memorabilia into the content and dotting that content around hotspots. We felt it’d make the experience more engaging.
We produced general and location-specific content in a variety of styles
There are general augmented reality videos, including one where a sportsperson introduces the city. There are also other bits of content at specific locations. For example, if a user goes to the Principality Stadium and accesses the app, they’ll activate content that's unique to that location. In this particular instance, the content includes rugby videos, rugby highlights and a 3D animation of Gareth Edwards' Barbarians shirt from when he scored one of the greatest tries in history at the old Cardiff Arms Park.
I had very limited experience in building apps or taking things from concept to prototype
I used to work at a digital agency where we would develop things for clients, but it was nothing quite to this level. This was our first exploration of our own app. To help us build the app prototype, which we've called Viewfinder For Sports, we worked with an agency that had plenty of experience in building apps. We had several advisors, including Robin Moore, former head of innovation at BBC Wales, and Jamie Graham, from Who Knows Wins, as well as other people that had developed ideas from scratch. They gave us lots of guidance along the way.
To test the prototype, we asked a user group to try out the app at locations around Cardiff
The user group had people from our target market, which is primarily 30 to 50 year old men. It's people that are travelling with a partner or with their family who want to experience a bit of sport while they're there.
We set up the app on each user's phone, showed them how it worked and allowed them to explore the app and its different functionalities.
The feedback we had from users was very positive
We asked them to tell us what they liked about it, what they would like to see more of and what they didn't enjoy so much. From there, we could refine our offering, develop it and evolve it further.
The test users said that they liked the fact that different sports were all brought together in one place. They also liked how there were elements of history and heritage. Overall, we were really pleased.
There was still work to be done to evolve the product after the Clwstwr project
We continued to work on the app, developing it further based on the feedback. From a commercial positioning point of view, we needed to figure out exactly what sort of sports tourists we were targeting. For example, if you're a sports tourist that comes to Cardiff for the Six Nations, you're more likely to have a boozy few days than a weekend filled with heritage activities. We spent some time looking into this, amongst other things, and enhanced our product accordingly.
In the current iteration, we're looking at facilitating sales of sports tickets and taking a booking fee. There's also potential for us to develop a subscription model for some of our unique content.
In an ideal world, we'd love to create content on the app for all major sporting cities
We believe the app has the opportunity to scale up. It'd mean that if you're a sports fan, and you're going on holiday to a major city, you'd be able to see what opportunities there are in that location to engage with sports brands, sports companies, sporting events and buy sports merchandise. Facilitating these things could be a potential income stream for us.
We're hoping to springboard the app through an incubation programme
We've pitched the app to leAD, an organisation based in Germany set up by the grandchildren of Adi Dassler, who started Adidas. leAD has a sports technology incubation programme, which would be a great opportunity for us to be a part of. From the Clwstwr process and what we've learned and developed, we put together a strong application. If they invest in the product and put us on this six month programme, it'd give us a fantastic platform to take it further.
There'd be investment, access to a range of different specialists and organisations through the network, and, at the end of that, there'd be the opportunity to pitch to investors for more money to do a full build to take to market.
The Clwstwr process was really interesting and beneficial
The team was really helpful and showed us how to think differently about what we were doing, encouraging us to explore different avenues to make the most of the opportunity we have. We wouldn't be at the stage we're at now without Clwstwr.