National Football League

Experience Designer

Creative Director

2 UX/UI Designers

2 UX Researchers

I assisted in user interviews and owned the creation of the user personas and customer journey map.

Understand the different types of NFL fan and how our various digital products complement or hinder their experience. Discover how our deeper understand of the NFL fan can inform our approach to upcoming projects such as the redesign of the NFL Fantasy football iOS app.

Along with the reorganization, we also spent a good amount of time establishing our design process.

Our design process first defines the problem and then implements the solutions, always with the needs of the user demographic at the core of concept development. This process focuses on need finding, understanding, creating, thinking and doing. At the core of this process is a bias towards action and creation: by creating and testing something you can continue to learn and improve upon your initial ideas.

The design thinking process consists of these 5 steps: ‍

Empathy - Work to fully understand the experience of the user for whom you are designing. Do this through observation, interaction, and immersing yourself in their experiences

Define - Process and synthesize the findings from your empathy work in order to form a user point of view that you will address with your design.

Ideate - Explore a wide variety of possible solutions through generating a large quantity of diverse possible solutions, allowing you to step beyond the obvious and explore a range of ideas.

Prototype - Transform your ideas into a physical form so that you can experience and interact with them and, in the process, learn and develop more empathy

Test - Try out high-resolution products and use observations and feedback to refine prototypes, learn more about the user and refine your original point of view.

Our approach to building empathy began with establishing clear research goals. We wanted to know: ‍

Why are they a fan of the NFL? What do they get out of it?

What is their typical behavior during the week? NFL game consumption schedule.

How, when and why do they consume NFL related content?

What pain points exist around watching the NFL or interacting with NFL products?

What is missing around your NFL experience?

During the course of four weeks we conducted 28 user interviews with a variety of NFL fans in order to inform our personas. The result was 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.

After all our studies, we evaluated the user needs for each individual day that they open the app during a typical week of the NFL season and how quickly and easily they were able to perform their desired tasks on our prototype. The end result was the following document that illustrated what the app should allow the user to do, what users are usually thinking and feeling on each day and what opportunities this information presented to us. ‍

After all our studies, we evaluated the user needs for each individual day that they open the app during a typical week of the NFL season and how quickly and easily they were able to perform their desired tasks on our prototype. The end result was the following document that illustrated what the app should allow the user to do, what users are usually thinking and feeling on each day and what opportunities this information presented to us.