MSN SPORTS HUB 2.0
DESIGN SPRINT
Summary
The HUB 2.0 project, in short, is a revamp of the Sports experience on MSN (current Microsoft Start.com). Through the design sprint, we would like to create inspirational design concepts of the HUB that demonstrate a wide range of experiences that the sports team could pursue as new directions for sports experiences.
Early concept during team showcase
Sprint Principles
Personalization, freshness, engaging UX
We will focus the experience on a personalized landing page (user following sports interests) and design the content in a way that highlights the newest/freshest content.
Scalability
Try to achieve scalable and templatized design solutions across other sports types with available data points.
New navigation model
Propose new navigation models to design system for optimizing sports navigation experience.
My Role
Partnered with other 2 segment designers within MSN space, I started the design process on Premier League soccer sport as pioneer and have successfully helped shape the north star direction of new sports experience on MSN.
Teams
MSN sports engineering team and lead
Sports SMEs and PMs
Segment designers from MSN sports and news
Design researcher
Partners
Bing search team
Accessibility support
MSN design system org
The Journey
For Premier League, I started the process by conducting a first batch of design researches:
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Premier League brand stories
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Current MSN Sports experience
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Competitive analysis and deep dives
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Moodboarding
These researches had helped me better drive the design decisions when it comes to different feature sets, data displays, IA, visual language and UIs.
User Interviews
To help inform the redesign of our sports hub we wanted to better understand how fans consume content related to their league, team(s), and player(s), so we interviewed 12 NFL fans and 12 soccer fans globally (US, Brazil, Germany, France, Italy, UK).
From these sessions we learned:
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Motivations
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Information channels they use (websites, apps, social media)
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Content and features they care most about
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Mobile vs. desktop usage
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Personalization
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Game day experience
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Biggest frustrations
More importantly, from the researches and interviews we conducted above, we came up with the initial set of data modules based on research insights.
Then we started our iterative design journey from low to high fidelity concepts for both landing and game centre experiences, I was thinking of two directions as safer option of following the existing framework from MSN (start.com) vs GO WILD mentality by introducing a single and dynamic layout.
For the game centre experience which allows users to check match details for their favourite teams and players, we had worked on the 3 different game scenarios of pre-game, live game and post game, as well as the mobile responsiveness.
As of today, the segment team has still been polishing and implementing the new experience over Microsoft Start.com, soon we will support more sports types and expand further the content offerings.