I learned to identify research opportunities, translate requirements into delightful experiences, and defend my design decisions as a UX Designer on the March Madness Live app.
Overview
I spent the first few years of my career working at WarnerMedia with NCAA Digital designing NCAA.com and the March Madness Live app: a business that delivers an Emmy award-winning streaming experience with interactive bracket games to millions of March Madness fans each year across mobile, web, and connected TV’s.
Working at a business who’s product is active for less than a month every year means there’s an intense focus on preparation: thorough user research and testing, designing for every use case and pain point imaginable from our millions of users, and rigorous product QA & testing to make sure everything is ready to go when Selection Sunday airs to kick off the tournament.
The Team
I worked alongside a design team consisting of a couple of UX Designers, a few product/visual designers.
Alongside the design team I spent a lot of my time coordinating with Product Managers, UX Researchers (to plan agile user studies and tests), developers and tech leads, editorial staffers and reporters, and a sales team.
My Role
As a UX Architect, the focus of my role was to ensure our product that was designed with the fan's desires, pain-points, and needs in mind. The process typically looked like...
- Working with UX researchers to develop test plans and studies to learn about our fans.
- Analyzing those results with Product Managers and began designing user flows & wireframes to flesh out important features.
- Coordinating with Product Designers to ensure those ideas and flows were designed with accessibility, responsiveness, and the user in mind.
- Calling out important design notes within annotations to ensure our developers built the product exactly as intended and as efficiently as possible.
- Presenting and selling these ideas, wireframes, and final designs to Senior leadership and other key stakeholders; either getting the green light or taking in constructive feedback to pivot on existing designs.
Watch Experience
Game Center
I worked along side developers, product managers, and other stakeholders to redesign the watch experience on every platform: app (mobile & tablet), web (mobile to desktop), and Connected (Apple TV, Roku, etc,).
Each platform had their own challenges and important factors. Our mobile web and mobile app users were often on the go, web users might be sneaking a game in while at work, and our connected users typically wanted more of a lean-back experience.
Our team looked at data and conducted user studies to ensure we were offering the right set of accompanying features to each of those platforms while they watched the games.
Picture-in-Picture
A tournament as intense and long as March Madness means fans are interrupting quite a bit of their life to catch every moment. Picture-in-picture helped our fans sneak away and finish other tasks like sending a text or checking their bracket while the madness goes on.
Continuous Play
Since tournament games run back-to-back, we designed our video player to send our fans into the next game right after the clock stops to catch the next cinderella story or buzzer beater.
Game Switching
We focused on designing the best experience for watching games and discovering exciting moments with tags to mark close games and potential upsets and removing ads within the last 5 minutes of a game to make sure our fans could enjoy every exciting moment of the tournament.
Bracket Games
Bracket Challenge Game
Everyone’s quest for a perfect bracket has to start and end at some point. I also played a role in maintaining and designing portions of the NCAA’s official Men’s Bracket Challenge Game on the app and website.
Starting Lineup Challenge
We introduced a new bracket game for the 2022 Men’s March Madness Tournament called the Starting Lineup Challenge (check out the rules). I was responsible for taking the game from an excel spreadsheet concept to an interactive game fans could play on mobile & web.
This included mapping out the paths for completing tasks like trading teams throughout the tournament, checking your portfolio of teams and how they’re doing, and onboarding fans to teach new game as they encounter new tasks and situations.