My Role
I provided design direction for the redesign of the STATS LLC’s Hosted Solution® - a sports content delivery platform. Clients include: Fox Sports, NBC Sports, Buffalo Wild Wings, among others. The collection of clients delivers content to millions of daily users, worldwide.
Product Overview
STATS’ Hosted Solution® has delivered content to many clients over the years. My role included bringing the solution up to date using more powerful, modern, and efficient technologies to improve the performance and support for increasing clientele - while providing a fresh and responsive design.
This project is still in the development phase, but some progress can be found here: dev-hosted3.stats.com
Ideation
Partnering with three project managers and a lead developer, we developed a plan to improve the performance and aesthetic of the existing Hosted Solution platform, catering to user behaviors to enhance the experience.
Strategy
We opted for a lean approach, emphasizing rapid sketching, prototyping, feedback and mockups. I initially created low-fidelity wireframes in the form of sketches, then translated them to high fidelity prototypes using the software Axure. I presented these to stakeholders and developers in order to continue ideation, drive decision making, and align the direction with everyone involved. This lean approach created a stronger ownership across all disciplines in the project.
Planning Scope & Definition
Working directly with project management and stakeholders, I prioritized and negotiated platform features and usability guidelines that were of low, medium, and high priority. While also discussed with developers, we established technical limitations and opportunities, while identifying what content and features aligned with business objectives. These discussions improved our process of prioritizing the product feature roadmap and product backlog.
Design Coordination & Execution
I designed across and collaborated with developers and stakeholders to translate key product features for each responsive breakpoint: mobile, tablet, and web. I produced user scenarios, wireframes, prototypes, and final mockups - while implementing industry-accepted usability guidelines. I also provided front-end development expertise as developers ran into display issues in the interface. Due to the nature of the product and unpredictable display of various content across multiple languages, it was important to have the most optimal markup and styles to account for a wide range of scenarios.
Leadership
During the development of the redesigned product, I acted as the director of design and user experience. I routinely presented progress of prototypes and mockups to illustrate various user interactions and interface updates throughout the project lifecycle. I continuously pair programmed with developers in order to have HTML, CSS, and JS align with the vision of original mocks and prototypes, providing front-end technical expertise to resolve various issues.
Deliverables
Using a wide array of tools, including Adobe CS, Sketch, Invision, Axure, these are a few of the various deliverables for this project.
Reflection
Although we did use a Lean UX approach for this project, there were a few steps we opted to overlook. Certain steps in the process I have had experience with in the past like storytelling and personas were not included due to time constraints, but would have been valuable. These omissions left out a little bit of the empathy and understanding of the context of how different users would use the platform. Excluding these steps did not diminish our final results, of which I am very proud of, but may have helped reach certain design decisions and establish proper priorities in a more efficient way.
Deliverables
Wireframes, mocks, prototypes, and a lot of other UX deliverables were rapidly produced during my time on the Hosted Solutions redesign project. Below are a few examples of some of these: