La Gazzetta dello Sport: new methods to take on the UX design

Some weeks ago our team celebrated the release of the new website of La Gazzetta dello Sport, a project we have worked on. Our friends and followers have begun a conversation on the methods and strategy we have adopted to design that complex digital ecosystem in such short time. So how did we do the design of the new digital experience for La Gazzetta dello Sport?The challenge was clear: redefine the whole experience across digital touchpoints and make it consistent to La Gazzetta dello Sport’s readers. The other goal was to increase the performance and fruition rate of all the contents and services offered. The project was developed in a framework of deep transformation of the publishing system, that is fluctuating from paper to digital. On the other hand there was the complexity of the internal organization that was involving many key stakeholders for content generation, management and technology.

Let’s start our overview on the project from the beginning: a team of six people, among whom there were designers, researchers and information architects, was assigned to follow up the entire project throughout the evolutive experience design process.

The project was lead on throughout timeboxed phases each with a clear output goal. Every step’s outcome had to lead to a MVP in order to start over with the evolutive phase where final users were actively involved.

Gazzetta was a project that let us explore many aspects of the design leadership, management and coaching within evo framework, this allowed Sketchin team to refine its operativity. In our opinion this was the key factor to project’s success.

Within the first seven weeks of project the focus was on the accomplishment of those goals that could bring on the first three phases of evo. On the initial part — define — we outlined the vision of the project with a series of workshops that involved all the stakeholders, in this way we could understand their expectations on business model, editorial policy, brand, advertising and KPI, moreover we were able to generate a clear and shared view on the direction the project would follow.

We then spent the next four weeks on understanding the users and their behaviors as well as the experience they were living when coming to sport information. Within field research we carried on a series of interview that we then matched with data analysis; this let us understand which were the users’ needs and which was their behavior across touchpoints.

We went through the phase of discovery in a completely participative way, sharing all the informations and insights gathered throughout a series of workshops with all the stakeholders, this helped us in redefining the experience of the product and of the services it offered, moreover it let the basic discovery of design process to be transparent.

In the end of this phase we had a clear and shared definition of which was the MVP and the experience it would deliver. In the mean time we developed the basis for the new UI and the design language to go with it, aligning them to the paper’s established brand identity.

We have always been working in time-boxes across the first three phases, each of them had a defined goal but could use different techniques to reach it (design thinking, co-design workshop, conceptual design, visualization..). This practice let us build a common ground with a shared language so that the team could stay focused on the experience they were designing for the final user rather than on just the aesthetics of it.

The core of design has been developed across two working pipelines: one lead to the release of gazzetta.it and the other one will release its outcomes soon.

Four months have been dedicated to the design phase and two were assigned to the quality assurance and the support to developers. We have adopted an iterative — incremental approach to the project which derived from agile methodology, in facts we have organized the project in 19 weeks of iteration that had an established day to review and share contents between the team and the stakeholders. This practice let us share the project in its different phases of development and with those that had the expertise and field domain. In fact we believe that no one rather than a journalist knows best how to write for information and has a domain in media online business, so sharing with them this knowledge and gathering their feedbacks was fundamental to design specific features.

In this phase some aspects emerged to define the project governance:

• The role of design leader is fundamental for product management in the beginning of design phase. In facts, design leader’s role is to coordinate and communicate with all the stakeholders involved in the project, she also defines who is needed and when in order to develop that specific product feature. She is also in charge of involving stakeholders in the iteration reviews and has to coach internal stakeholders with knowledge sharing on product.
• The importance of the design review: with such tight iterations, it’s crucial to dedicate some time each day -around a hour- to review design choices and either reframe them or follow them. This helps in keeping the coherence and consistence in the design.
• High Fidelity Prototype it’s fundamental especially when you design for media and for responsive design. To test and develop prototypes that are already responsive and incorporate titles, contents, signatures and real comments is key to understand how they do function and behave when in use, whether they change the meaning of a specific interface across different break-points and channels.
• Complete Flexibility in the procedures: deliverables and techniques are not the final goal. Since the beginning of the project we have decided to develop an interactive prototype and everything that was needed to support it: deliverables and design activities would be defined when emerging during the iterations. Within each iteration the team flexibly defined which design practices and tools adopt in order to maximize and support the exploration of the specific phase they were at: interactive prototypes, Hi-Fi demo, sketches, animated videos, HTML simulations and so on. This made us extremely efficient but required a very high seniority of the team.
• User constant involvement throughout user research. The team had an on-demand budget to run agile user testing and focus groups: as soon as they perceived that a solution was mature enough to be validated with the users, a test activity was scheduled for the next iterative session.
• Design in pairs of interaction designers and visual designers made us effective in weekly iteration delivery: they firstly aligned on the project idea on paper and whiteboards and then worked on finalizing the ideas.

Thanks to the use of these practices, that have now been implemented and consolidated in our team-work, we were able to keep the whole team and the stakeholders focused on the project as well as deliver more effective outcomes. Moreover we were able to test the entire product on users and we believe this is a great goal. We think that most of the practices that we used can become interesting inputs for a conversation with teams that face similar challenges and we would be happy to have a chat with them!

It is no secret that we put a lot of passion and effort in finalizing this project but we would have never reached such goal without the same passion and involvement of RCS and Gazzetta teams.

Now a new challenge arises, with the release of gazzetta.it the evolving phase has begun, with the monitoring of the user experience and the evidence of new business requirements we will be able to define how to complete La Gazzetta dello Sport digital offering. Our goal is to have their final users, all those sports passionates, to live the best experience as possible.