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Your Favorite Team’s Favorite Team – Innovation Days 2024

Overview

In September 2024, I participated in Spectrum TV’s Innovation Days. Innovation Days is a three-day-long venture that allows teams to submit ideas they’d like to do but wouldn’t otherwise have time to work on. This can be anything from a broader research project to developing a new feature. I worked alongside a software engineer to create a new favorite sports feature for the Spectrum TV app.

Duration

September 3rd – 5th, 2024

My Role

Lead UX Designer, Accessibility Specialist

Problem Statement

Research shows that roughly 70% of Americans watch sports but only 36% of viewers watch with a cable or satellite subscription. This tells us that the majority of viewers are going to individualized streaming services for their sports content. Spectrum TV needs to provide a personalized, easy to use sports experience for their subscribers.

Spectrum logo

Current Experience

The current Spectrum TV live sports experience leaves much to be desired. The only constant display of sports content is one swimlane on the Home page. This swimlane shows 32 assets that may be live or upcoming in the next 3 days. There is no way to predict or curate those 32 assets to user preferences.

The design is quite busy and there is a lot of information on each asset card. This in combination with the amount of scrolling required to possibly find what you’re looking for creates a poor user experience. And further, this poses concerns for a variety of users with accessibility needed.

Accessibility concerns:

    • A blind user would need to listen to the Text to Speech (TTS) on every card and may or may not find what they want. This is a time-consuming, dull process.
    • A user with motor disabilities may find it difficult to scroll 32 times to reach their content.
    • A user with cognitive disabilities may find the display of information difficult to comprehend.
Full home page view for Spectrum TV. The Live Sports swimlane is buried at the end of the page.

If a user doesn’t find their desired content in the Live Sports swimlane on the Home page, they can manually search for their team. The difficulty here is that the search query is by term so if you are looking for the “Chicago Bears” and only type “Chicago,” the query pulls 32 results that contain the word “Chicago.”

Typing on a TV always poses challenges and frustration. The Spectrum TV keyboard is a single row in alphabetical order. This layout makes quick navigation and entry difficult for all users especially those with accessibility needs.

Accessibility concerns for the keyboard:

    • Lots of scrolling. A user with motor disabilities, such as low dexterity, may have difficulty repeatedly pressing the remote buttons.
    • The special characters’ keyboard is not arranged predictably. A TTS user would need to take additional time to find what they’re looking for. 
    • Capital letters are not always on display. They only appear on pressing UP from a focused letter and then the capital letter is automatically selected.
Search results showing everything for NCAA

Overall, the current user experience of searching for and selecting your desired sports content is poor.

Objective

I set out to create an easy-to-use, curated sports portal. This would allow users to select their favorite teams across a variety of different sports and leagues. This would allow users to select exactly what they want to see, and it would be easy to find with minimal scrolling. The onboarding time of selecting your favorite teams the first time may take a few minutes, but it would reduce the ongoing effort of finding your desired content.

I needed to create a handful of flows to feed into this feature:

    • A portal from the home page to enter the Sports page
    • The sports page itself
    • A method for users to manage their favorite teams
    • An option in Settings to automatically record the games from their favorite teams
    • A promotional piece informing users of the new feature

Design

Since I was working within a short time frame and the design had to be cohesive with the rest of the Spectrum TV application, many of the components of the designs have been repurposed from other sections of the app or have been slightly modified to fit the intended purpose.

Promotional Content

I created a promotional portal advertising the new Favorite Teams feature. This feature was designed just in time for the start of football season so the background image focuses on three players of the Denver Broncos. The content itself reads “Football is Back! All of your favorite teams at your fingertips. Never miss a game again. You can now choose your favorite teams to create a personalized live sports experience.” and the primary CTA would take the user directly into the Sports page.

Stakeholder empathy map showing the pains, gains, goals, concerns, what we need to do, and how we feel

Sports Portal on Home

The Home page portal sits in place of the Live Sports swimlane. This is a graphic and bold display that will catch the user’s attention and bring them to the Sports page where they can select their favorite teams and build their curated content.

Stakeholder empathy map showing the pains, gains, goals, concerns, what we need to do, and how we feel

Sports Page

The Sports page needed to have two different states – one for when you haven’t selected any favorite teams, and a second for when you have selected teams and there is content available.

The sports page also features a Recordings swimlane with the option to view your DVR since the user has the ability to turn on auto-recording for their favorite teams.

Tanya persona. A stay at home mom who makes a weekly grocery list and needs a hassle-free way to get healthy food for her family
Eric persona. Eric recently survived a car accident and is looking for work. He needs something that isn't physically strenuous and a supportive community

Manage Favorites

The Manage Favorites flow is adapted from the current flow to set up the startup channel for live TV. Since we wanted to do something graphic and eye-catching, we have the different teams arranged by sport and league in a tab menu at the top of the page. Within each tab are the teams for the relevant league. These are arranged in a five-column grid with the team logo and name on smaller cards. There is a clear, high contrast checkbox in the bottom right corner of each card to clearly detect which teams are favorited.

Stakeholder empathy map showing the pains, gains, goals, concerns, what we need to do, and how we feel

Settings

Adding the option to auto-record your favorite teams content was very simple. I added a toggle to the Preferences section in settings and there is language in the Manage Favorites flow instructing a user to go to Preferences to turn on auto-recording.

Stakeholder empathy map showing the pains, gains, goals, concerns, what we need to do, and how we feel

Outcome

Given the short time-frame, this project was a huge success. On presenting this to organization leadership, we were invited to the final round where we had the opportunity to present to executive leadership. After final round presentations, we secured the winning title earning the “Best in Show” award. This feature will now be up for continued implementation in the production environment.