In our company we wanted to help our sport customers evolve their products by inquiring more into this vertical and running a research that will help us identify market trends and learn from the sport user. After many interesting discoveries we decided to challenge ourselves and create a white-labeled and user centric football product.
The plan is to start with a benchmark where we will look at solutions in the market as well as evaluate our past experience in projects with customers. With our conclusions from the previous activities we will have a set of assumptions that we then want to confirm with real sport users. Our goal is to identify market trends, see what works and what doesn't, and understand users expectations from this products.
The benchmark helped us: identify do's & dont's from our previous solutions; review solutions from other vendors; look at apps of specific sports to discover how the navigation, content and functionalities differ from each other and why; understand how others implemented data and stats; get inspiration for visual design.
We set two focus groups (5 participants each) with an open discussion of 1.5 hrs of duration. During the focus group we discussed how they enjoyed their favourite sport, which apps or services they preferred and why. One focus group was composed by soccer fans and the other one by mixed sports fans.
We prepared nine interviews in total, three per type of sport. Each Interview had a 60 minutes duration. Through these interviews we assessed our findings from previous benchmark and focus groups. During the process we also showed them a selection of real sport apps so we could gather their impressions and feedback.
The discoveries from the research helped us understand better the most valuable products and features in the sport market. It was very inspiring listening to users and understanding what they are looking for in a sport product, preferred devices to watch content, gathering insights and ideas. The situation was exciting and we saw an opportunity to build an innovative (TV first) football product with a user centric approach.
Our goal is to build a white-labeled product for the football fans. We listened to the users and we want to make a suitable solution for them. We also think this is a good opportunity to introduce our innovative solution to stakeholders. While planning the long-term product we also worked in parallel to deliver a prototype demo for NAB show 2019.
According to our research, during live games, the majority of users would like to envision stats, scores, replays and even highlights on the same TV screen. The biggest challenge of this product was to integrate all those features in a the same screen without breaking the design principles of it: simple navigation and information density.
To facilitate content digestion the product offers to the users a custom experience since the beginning. When starting the app and selecting a team the app will prioritise content related to it. User will also have its Team area with additional information of players, calendar, tournaments...
Users want to see stats and info related to the game without disrupting it. To make this possible we thought of an innovative side panel to consult stats and data. Also hidden tiles to access replays and game highlights.
After presenting the product demo atNAB Show 2019, new opportunities raised, now we are working on projects for: Bundesliga, Football Portuguese Federation and Premier League. We also draw the attention of FIFA for whom we elaborated some initial concepts for potential opportunities (check outmy projectsfor more).
