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National Football League
June 2019 - March 2020
Experience Designer
Creative Director
2 UX/UI Designers
2 UX Researchers
As a junior designer during this transformative period, I played a crucial role in supporting the NFL's new user-centered approach. My responsibilities encompassed assisting with user interviews, a pivotal component of our empathy-building process. These interviews provided invaluable insights into fan behaviors, preferences, and pain points. Additionally, I contributed to various design tasks, working collaboratively with senior team members to translate our research findings into tangible design solutions. This experience not only broadened my skill set but also deepened my understanding of how user research directly informs effective design in a high-stakes, fan-centric environment like the NFL.
Our primary objective was to develop a nuanced understanding of the diverse NFL fan base and how our digital products either enhanced or impeded their experience. This involved creating detailed fan personas, each representing distinct behaviors, preferences, and engagement levels. We also aimed to leverage these insights to inform our approach to upcoming projects, with a particular focus on the redesign of the NFL Fantasy Football iOS app.
By mapping the user journey of each fan type across our digital ecosystem, we identified key touchpoints, pain points, and opportunities for improvement. This comprehensive analysis allowed us to pinpoint areas where our products could be optimized to better serve each fan segment. The deep dive into fan behaviors and motivations provided a solid foundation for making data-driven design decisions, ensuring that our redesign efforts, especially for the Fantasy Football app, would resonate with users and elevate their overall NFL digital experience.
Concurrent with the organizational restructuring, we invested significant effort in establishing a robust and user-centric design process. This methodology was carefully crafted to first define the problem comprehensively before implementing solutions, always keeping the needs of our diverse user demographic at the heart of concept development.
Our design process is founded on five key pillars: need finding, understanding, creating, thinking, and doing. This holistic approach ensures that every design decision is rooted in genuine user needs and supported by deep insights.
At the core of our methodology lies a strong bias towards action and creation. We firmly believe that the act of creating and testing prototypes serves as a powerful learning tool, allowing us to continuously refine and improve upon our initial ideas. This iterative approach fosters innovation and ensures that our final products truly resonate with NFL fans.
By embracing this dynamic, user-centered process, we've positioned ourselves to deliver digital experiences that not only meet but exceed the expectations of our passionate fan base.
The design thinking process consists of these 5 steps:
Our approach to building empathy began with establishing clear research goals. We wanted to know:
We worked closely with an outside vendor to produce 6 distinct personas.
During early conversations with Fantasy Football users, we began to understand each type of motivation that influences them to interact with our Fantasy product. We identified four psychological motivations:
Sensation seeking - Intensely drawn to activities that result in psychological arousal. In the context of Fantasy Football, this arousal involves participating for the thrill of victory or strictly for entertainment purposes.
Need for cognition - This type of user is motivated by the amount of information gathering, analysis of statistics and staying in touch with the game of football. There are two types within this category, one being a user that prefers analysis done by experts and the other prefers access to raw data in order to derive their own insights.
Locus of control - This refers to how much control a user believes they have on the outcome. An internal locus of control believes that the end-result is a consequence of their behavior. An external locus tends to attribute the end result to luck, chance or fate. Users with an internal locus of control are more inclined to research, manipulate their lineup, etc.
Social interaction - Possibly the most common motivation for Fantasy Football involvement is the social bond that a user experiences. Fantasy players are often introduced to the game by friends, family or peers and they enjoy the social interaction that it encourages.
We spent a lot of time identifying these motivations and constantly referenced them as we conducted our studies. One of the studies I conducted was focused on measuring the successful completion of four tasks related to setting a lineup, switching leagues, watching video content and checking schedules/standings.
As an example, one of the tasks gave the user a specific scenario: It's Monday night but you're not home or near a TV. You hear Aaron Rodgers just scored a touchdown, he is on your team (Team 2, League 2) Where would you find out all the information about this touchdown. Here is a portion of our results document.
Following our comprehensive studies, we conducted a meticulous evaluation of user needs for each day of a typical NFL season week. This analysis focused on how efficiently and effortlessly users could perform their desired tasks within our prototype app.
The culmination of this research was a pivotal document that provided a multifaceted view of the user experience. This detailed breakdown allowed us to map the ebb and flow of user engagement throughout the week, aligning our design decisions with the natural rhythm of the NFL season. By understanding the nuanced daily needs and emotional states of our users, we identified targeted opportunities to improve app functionality, streamline user workflows, and create more engaging and satisfying experiences.
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