The world went into a panic when the NBA and NHL got cancelled. I worked with a large team to bring a sense of normalcy back into the homes of sports fans everywhere.
There were five designers on this project. The Design Lead and two Senior Designers managed most of communication with the many stakeholders, relaying information back to two Junior Designers, including me.
After the launch of the MVP I took on more ownership of the communication process to reduce bottlenecks. I communicated directly with the Engineering team for feasibility checks and stakeholders of various departments to gather context for my designs.
I owned different stages of the design process. I owned pieces of the user-flows, wireframed various features, created high-fidelity designs, and handed them off to Engineers.
After the launch of the MVP, I worked with the other designers to gather user-feedback from our internal networks.
The team had five weeks to launch an MVP for the return of sports. With over 95 people invited to every meeting, this large cross-functional team had daily 4PM check-ins for the first three weeks - with departments presenting updates as they had them.
If I had completed a wireframe or high-fidelity design of a feature, I would walk the greater group through the journey. Designers normally presented 1-2 features per session.
As we switched our focus towards delivery, we rolled out rituals to adapt to the growing team including:
A daily Slack stand-up
1 week sprints to discuss goals for that week
Backlog management in the form of user stories
We paired design for most of the project. This is the process that we went through:
1. User Flow
All designers worked together to create a user flow map of the entire product. I worked on the Onboarding flow.
2. User Experience - Low-Fidelity Wireframes
Three designers worked on low-fidelity wireframes to create seamless and usable experiences for fans. As each feature was completed, we handed them off the Engineers to start building the product’s functionality, while the fourth designer jumped straight from user-flows to high-fidelity designing.
3. User Interface - High Fidelity Designs
Once 85% of the wireframes were complete, I jumped into high-fidelity designing. I sourced inspiration from Dribbble or existing products with a simliar context. I often looked at sports video games to create similar experiences to be used in a different context.
4. Dev Handoff
While preparing designs for handoff, I deleted layers not in use, ensured the components used were aligned with our previous systems, make any new components, and checked that everything sat on the 8pt grid.
5. Design QA
After the build was complete, design QA was done through a Trello board to highlight any visual bugs. We included screenshots of the visual bug, wrote the description, and linked the corresponding Figma artboard.
6. Results and Metrics - Collecting Feedback
Collecting feedback is critical as we iterate and build upon our MVP. We implemented a feedback form with questions that we continue to improve on.
7. Iterations
Now that we have launched our MVP for beta testing, we want to focus on increasing the stickiness of the product, maximizing retention. We use survey results to guide our decisions.
With working on a project of this scale I learned a lot that will change the way I work in the future.
Collaborating With a Big Team
Working with four other designers is very different than working alone. It brings to light how important staying organized is when designing. That means labelling layers, frames, and creating components - making artboards easy to find for when another designer has to step into my design process and vice versa.
The Power of Components
This project made me more fluent in setting up components. When designing a large new app, components make it exceptionally easy to update designs for the entire project when a pivot is needed. The challenge is ensuring components stay organized and up-to-date through rounds of exploration. Cleaning them up as part of the hand-off process helped for me.
*This project has yet to be launched to the public, however, I’d be happy discuss this project in more depth in an interview!
