Sportsnet (2014-2015)
Giving every fan a place to call home
Role: Senior Product Designer
Key Challenges: The Sportsnet App was entering a new era of live streaming on mobile devices and was aiming to lead the charge within the space. Already a leader in sports, Sportsnet was looking to take their fan experience to the next level through their stats, data, and event support experience.
What I did: Helping to direct UX and design for Playground, we collaborated directly with Rogers Sportsnet to design and develop their new mobile app.
Our goal was to provide Sportsnet users with an experience they’ve never seen before. Something that they can be proud of, use often, share, and for the app to become a staple in sports entertainment for years to come. I’m proud to say that a lot of what we designed is still a core part of the product today.
There was a lot of new competition in the interactive sports app space at the time and Rogers wanted to take their mobile experience to the next level. My experience designing the award winning theScore app in previous years really helped guide my decision making for this new project.
Rogers had the advantage of leveraging their Sportsnet television channel to allow users to stream directly into the app with their cable subscription. An option that was cutting edge at the time.
The sports experience is something that can’t be replaced by Netflix. It’s real-time, it’s always updating and it’s a shared moment. Our goal was to provide a very robust and useful experience for sports fans of every type and have the tool become the go-to for sports entertainment for the fans.
Working in weekly sprints with the product, development, and design teams at Rogers, we set the vision for how the experience needed to work for the audience. We then moved forward with user personas and journey mapping to help set the foundation for the navigation. We built moodboards to nail the tone. We did benchmark testing with Rogers employees throughout the process. And we did extensive wireframing and prototyping to get the flow of the experience right.
Once we had a good grip on what was working in each area and it just felt right, we continued with development, fine tuning the interactions, and refined the “delight layer” until we arrived at the final product.
The app won the Digi award for “Best Mobile App Utility” shortly after launch. I started my journey with Insider almost immediately following the Sportsnet project.