Fox Sports App

The Legacy

Since 2011, Fox Sports Australia has been on a mission to shift their sports content towards the digital space. For over 20,000 TV box subscribers this means having access to sports content on the App, tablet and website.

The Fox Sports App, first designed in 2012 struggled to scale alongside the hyper-growth of the company. Fundamental usability was challenged as disparate features and contents competed for focus. App reliability and performance issues increased exponentially.

The Fox Sports app had became an information pyramid.

Discovery

Unpacking the problems

Before jumping into solution mode, it was important to check ‘under the hood’ for obvious issues. With abundant access to data and customer’s feedback, I’ve found 4 major issues that were recurring.

Four major pain points were quickly identified:

1. Videos are poor in quality

2. Matches that are not playing on time

3. Ads were too disruptive during the match

4. Onboarding & Content discoverability was poor

Defining scope

From a UX perspective, on-boarding, content discoverability and match timings have the highest user/business impact and the least effort/time to implement as there’s no video production involvement and requirements.

Therefore, it was clear to the team that these problems should be addressed as part of MVP.

In order to have shared understanding amongst product managers, designers and developers, I've reframed the above problem statements.

Research

Competitive Studies

In order to provide an effortless on-boarding process that allow users to customise their experience, I turned to the market and started researching similar apps.

Almost all sports app goes through a similar on-boarding process e.g. first pick your favourite sports then pick your favourite teams. That said, not all sports app provide users the ability to control and personalised their teams as they browse the app or set notification for matches they want to watch.

Who's our target audience?

Primary Personas

The audience for this initiative are focused on sports fanatics who are always on the go. Therefore, viewing sports content on mobile will is a major part of their daily consumption habit.

Two specific personas were derived:

1. Sports Super Fan - Dedicated to a sport or a team

2. Sports Disruptor - Socially active across sports media — primarily mobile

The Impact

Positive results

The test was done with 10 participants with specific tasks to test both hypothesis. Where the first 5 participants were shown the current design before the new design. Then the sequence was re-ordered for the next 5 participants to eliminate default effect.

Findings for hypothesis 1:

Users found the setting up process simple to understand e.g. with sports and team selection.

They thought the on-boarding flow was what they expected. Using simple checkboxes to select multiple sports and teams is an easy way to personalise. The top nav horizontal design also helped browsing the contents efficiently.

"In the new design, looking from left to right works more naturally..Top nav is layout in an obvious manner so everything is easy to find."

"Add sports and teams are very easy in the new design."

"In the current design, contents are in the menu and you have to look for stuff."

Most of them love the idea of ‘My Sports’ Collection and the idea of adding teams as they browse. This allowed them to find contents on their favourite teams easily.

Users found sub-category in the drop-down menu and ‘+’ sign to add content very straightforward.

Adding content on the new design was much easier, all users had some trouble customising their sports in the current app.

Most users liked to control what contents are added in their collection and are easily accessible.

"Easier with the new design as there is new content with a 'plus button' that helps me identify adding new content. The current design, I can't differentiate which are my contents vs available contents to add."