Designing the Best Experience for Sports Fans
With the rise of internet-based on demand and streaming services, sports programing has become one of the most important differentiators of our service. Our team was tasked with a redesign of a game-locating app on the receiver. Our team felt the best way to approach this project would be to explore the entire experience of a sports fan. Several facets of our system are dedicated to sports-related content. We wanted to identify inconsistencies and pain points in order to design a coherent, user-centered sports experience.
We took both a quantitative and qualitative approach to researching the sports experience. We first did path analysis to find how most users were navigating to sports content. We found certain dedicated sports features had low usage rates. We then set up interviews to better understand why people used certain features over others. For example, we found that few people were aware of the dedicated team pages. Participants were overwhelmingly positive about the team pages, however navigating to the pages was way too cumbersome for them.
From our research, we constructed 3 user personas. The first person represents a person who always defaulted to some kind of sports content. A key motivation for this person was a human interest in the players, following them from college to the pros and maybe to coaching and commentary. The second persona was the team fan that was motivated by nostalgia and social needs. This person grows up watching a specific team, building loyalty and often sees games as events. The third persona was one who previously fell into the first or second persona, but has now shifted other aspects of their life over sports. The person is motivated by a desire to still be able to participate in conversations around sports at work or in social situations.
Improvements to certain sports features have already increased usage. We’re continuing to test and improve designs. Since the sports experience expands to several different areas on the UI, it gives us the opportunity to iterate on one area before applying those improvements to the rest of the UI. We’re also calibrating our recommendation algorithms to better surface related sports documentaries and commentaries to sports fans.
