The way Gen Z consumes sports content has shifted over time. While other generations are more likely to watch live sports, younger generations are more inclined to search highlights and short online video reviews. How can we help Gen Z to immerse themselves more into (live) sports consumption?
A mobile sports content platform that is called “GAMEFACE by Eredivisie” that will show the users highlights, recaps and live match broadcasts based on real player positional data. Users can like and share and interact with match fragments. All this to engage the generation to come and tie them for a lifelong connection to the Eredivisie.
At the beginning of the project, I conducted a product discovery workshop with the Beyond Sports team consisting of Project Manager, Product Owner and Unity Developer, to get all the necessary information on the table. Mapping out business goals, creating user personas, and mapping out the functionalities helped us give the project a head start.
As I started out on the project after a concept design was created I wanted to create a Business Model Canvas to get more insight into all essential aspects of the project (problems, competitors, users, revenue sources, metrics, challenges). The client stated they already did the excersise and didn't want to spend any more time on this aspect. As I explained the importance of this exercise, I later created this artefact with the help of the Product Manager and the Marketing Team as we not only needed to find out the essential aspects, but also to further work out the product-market fit. I organised a workshop and we created a Business Model Canvas and a Value Proposition map. The aim was to help understand the market and develop a product to meet real needs. The chances of success are increased if there are matches between customer profile and value proposition, indicating a product-market fit.
Conducting User Interviews at the beginning of the project helped us to understand how our target audience is consuming sports content. To recruit those kids we consulted our direct network and interviewed 9 children in the 8-18 age range. Each interview lasted around 30-40 minutes, assessing the way young people consume sports content, are they more inclined to search for highlights and short video’s online?
The question we tried to get answered is what do they still miss while interacting with soccer content and how can we, as Beyond Sports, try and find a solution for that.
Without doing the interviews, we would have never learned that:
These insights helped us to find ways to see how we could shape information we want to share within the Gameface app. Also it showed us our biggest challenge, how do we create an app that will work on older phone models without eating up all their data and memory space?
From the interviews I’ve created 3 User Personas based off of the initial research and workshops with the client and users. Each persona represented the main user of Gameface Liam and his parents the decision makers within a household . The goal was to get a clear understanding of the user needs before mapping out the relevant features for them.
Exploring the (problems/needs/goals) helped me understand the way Gen Z is looking for information, how they search for it and what their limitations are. During the project we often looked back when thinking of features if it would solve a problem for our persona or not. We personified our user by calling him Liam and showing his persona during presentations.
User Journeys are an awesome tool to understand the experience the product can provide to its users. We have mapped out the current user journey and identified the pain points and challenges they have currently while consuming sports. With this CJM we wanted to map out where and when our product can help and can be used. After analysing the interviews, creating the persona’s and Empathy map we could create this artifact based on assumptions.
During our research we created a process surrounding the different pages that will benefit from the features and approach every page as unique. We created the user goals and flows for every feature/story for the different pages within GAMEFACE.
The project had many challenges facing the look and feel of this project and the overall designs changed a lot over time. With no clear vision and a client that overruled most design decisions made we created multiple concepts and ideas.
The most challenging part of this project was a client with a strong will, trying to convince them to move from their perspective of look and feel, that felt mostly chaotic, was a real big challenge which failed initially. After creating the first designs could test the designs and could show the client that users wanted something that was more easy on the eye. I explored different visual directions and created 6 to 7 different Look and Feel designs. All iterations on the previous designs.
For the final visual designs, I used Sketch and later on Figma. During this phase, I created all the screens for the product. The biggest challenge was to design an app that is created in Unity. UX and UI Design within Unity comes with a lot of constraints, therefore a lot of sacrifices were made on Usability.
Extensive user testing after the product went live, showed us multiple issues people had with the app, this also included the accessibility of the app. I then took the time to create my own vision of the app, without the constraints Unity brought to the table, this resulted in a new concept idea for the app Gameface.
Usability tests are vital when building digital products. During a test, participants are asked to perform a series of tasks while observing them and making notes. The usability test’s goal is to uncover flaws and things that are not straightforward in the designs. Using the test findings, we can iterate the designs and create a much better, smoother user experience.
The first concept was not tested and failed miserably. We created a second concept and convinced management to do a usability test to see if the concept and solutions within the app where clear. We also tested the concept internally; do people like to create their own highlights, watching moments from different angles etc.
We hired an external company to do the testing for us, as it was mid- Corona and hard for us to find participants online to help us test. The insights that came out of the user tests showed us they are really interested in the concept idea but sometimes missing certain aspects. It also didn’t really feel it would solve a real issue for them but it could work as a nice addition next to a match.
With these user tests we proved to the client that if we test our ideas and concepts we can find out early in the process if features, designs or any other idea will work for the target audience!
I am a UX designer with a passion for creating awesome experiences on multi dimensional platforms. I love to travel and explore new things.
