ESPN/ The Gist

Marina Heaney
Aug 23, 2017 · 6 min read

— Bringing Sports Coverage to the Sports Novice

The Task

Project 4 allowed myself and my cohort to do something we hadn’t done since project 1: be creative. We were asked to pick a host brand and create an additional offering that would supplement their service. After much thought and deliberating within our team, we submitted a proposal for ESPN: The Gist- the sports cheat sheet for the sports novice.

Research and Discovery

The Problem

We quickly discovered through our research that there are many apps on the market that cater towards sports fans and sports experts. However, these apps are littered with stats and terminology that might as well be Greek to the average sports novice. Knowing this, we created our problem statement:

“Sports novices need a way to get informed while viewing or attending a sporting event because they don’t like to feel left out or uninformed.”

The Brand

Once we knew our problem, the question became — which brand would be the most able to solving this problem. We settled on ESPN and came up with this opportunity statement:

As the top sports news broadcasting company, ESPN is best-suited to provide the sports novice a way to avoid feeling uninformed about sporting events, in real-time.

Existing ESPN offerings are hard to consume for the infrequent sports follower, and this problem presents a great opportunity for the company to address viewers who need a quick and easy resource of “need to know” information.

We chose ESPN due to its position as the leading sports news network and conglomerate. It is recognizable to all users, from the expert to even the most casual sports fan. We believed that their existing services and API would not only help support our new service, but it would also provide the brand recognition necessary to get the service off the ground and into the hands of our users.

Contextual Inquiry

Yankees vs. Mets

In order to put ourselves in the shoes of our users, we conducted some contextual inquiry by attending a Yankees game. We went with my family: three male sports fans that knew everything from game rules, to team history and player stats. The goal was to observe how they, as sports fans interacted with technology while at the game, and to conduct interviews with non-sports fans. Both myself and my partner however have limited knowledge of the sport. Our key takeaways from the experience included:

Storyboard
  • We felt confused and out of place for most of the game; we had many questions around buzzwords,rules of the game and lingo. Thankfully we were able to have our questions answered.

Competitive Analysis

After researching a variety of sports news providers, Tip Off Sports, Casual Spectator and Good Old Sport emerged as our direct competitors in serving easily digestible sports insights. Analysis of competing companies validates the problem surrounding density of sports news coverage and reveals areas of opportunity.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • Conversational tone used to convey conplex ideas thus effectively educating users

As a an established brand, the timing is opportune for ESPN, with its resources and credibility, to take advantage of this need emerging market sector.

Comparative Analysis

We also looked at apps that specialized in live coverage of sporting events. Along with looking at the existing ESPN app coverage, we identified three other comparative apps based on suggestions from sports fans and from their ratings on the iOS store: TheScore, 365Scores, and Bleacher Report. We looked at their heirarchy of game-day coverage along with what notifications the user receives on game day.

We found that:

  • It was rare to find common content across all four apps.

User Interviews

In order to recruit users, we created a screener survey and sent it out among both our professional and social networks. The diagram below displays how we chose our users.

Screener Survey Results

After completing our 12 interviews we synthesized our information into a series of “I” statements. The diagram below displays the synthesis of that information.

Personas

From this synthesis, we created two personas, a primary and secondary. This is George, our primary user.

Primary User Persona- The Social Sports Novice

George is an off-broadway actor that knows very little about sports, however, he likes watching sports for the comraderie it brings among his peers. From our interview information, we determined that his primary concern was being a part of the conversation. As a result, we determined that he cared about learning rules and lingo, following specific games in real time, learning about events in his area, relevant pre-game game information, receiving live game updates and notifications, and learning about trending sports topics as conversation pieces. From his needs, we were able to prioritize the features and featured content our solution would provide.

We also created Melissa, the client-facing professional sports fan.

Secondary persona — The Client-facing Professional

Melissa has to travel a lot and takes clients to sporting events in their home cities as part of her job. She may or may not be familiar with their home teams as a result. She likes to do research to familiarize herself with interesting sports facts and anecdotes to keep her clients engaged during the game, but has trouble understanding the overwhelming amount of information and articles just to get a high-level overview of the event.

We determined that Melissa needed a solution that provided her with custom notifications, Calendar reminders, and trending sports news all encompassed in a clean and clear design.

Technical Background Research

We chose to design a solution for a native application as described by the reasons below.

The Solution

We determined that our solution would have

  • A simple on boarding process to get the user engaged with the product.

Below is a link to the prototype.

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