Creating the ultimate armchair sports watching experience for Verizon.
For this project, I worked as a senior designer, working closely with 2 junior designers, a midweight and design lead. I ran workshops with the client, presented regularly and managed the more junior members of the team, ensuring they were okay with tasks.
Verizon came to us with an ambitious goal - to create the most innovative sports armchair experience in the US. The current sports experience was very basic and didn't offer much aside from standard watching. Verizon wanted to rise above the competition and leverage sports data as a means to enhance the watching experience, ie. users receiving live updates from a sports game they're watching. The main deliverables of the project were user research and UI for key hero journeys.
The start of the project was very research focussed - looking at competitors both in the US market and global. From this analysis, we were able to see what certain products were doing well, emerging trends, use of data in the watching experience and also gaps in which Verizon could potentially capitalise. From this analysis and from the insights we got from Verizon on current user watching behaviour, we built 5 personas (below) with individual needs and wants. From these 5 personas, 5 unique hero journeys were mapped out and we could begin to wireframe and conceptualise ideas.
We produced key screens for 5 seperate user journeys and tested them with real users. The challenge for the UI was keeping it consistent to the already well-known interface of Verizon TV, we wanted to keep it familiar for existing users. We designed an experience which allows causal sports fans to simply watch games but also an experience where hardcore fans can follow their team, keep updated and record games remotely - A jack of all trades experience. We worked tirelessly with the tech team at Verizon to ensure design decisions were feasible and worked very closely with real users to ensure the experience we were designing hit the mark for usability and enjoyment.
In Conclusion
The sports experience was a resounding success in the US. Although many of the features signed off from the engagement ended up on the cutting room floor, however the clients were exceptionally happy with the output from the design team.