︎ Home
︎ Projects
︎ Info






SportsEngine Play


Designing & shipping a minimum viable product in 6 months



In late 2022, NBC Sports Next acquired Rapid Replay, an application that enables users to capture livestreams of youth & recreational sporting events, as part of a larger strategy for the company to create an over-the-top viewing product and unlock a brand new direct-to-consumer customer base.

In December 2022, I joined the newly-formed video division as the sole UX designer, charged with the task of designing and building this new viewing product, SportsEngine Play, set to release alpha in June 2023 and officially launch in September 2023.

We had six months to design and deliver alpha.



SportsEngine Play Vision

For parents and fans of youth athletes who want to be able to participate in sporting events even when they can’t be at the game, SportsEngine Play is a centralized hub to watch, preserve, share, and celebrate all sport life moments in an athlete’s career.

Events can be streamed from any device, at any time, so no parent or fan should ever miss a moment of the game.

SportsEngine Play integrates seamlessly with other SportsEngine products, such as the mobile chat and schedule, so parents will always stay in-the-know.





 Getting to Alpha 

MVP Scope & Planning


My product team embarked on SportsEngine Play knowing that the scope had to stay light for launch, so we worked together to agree on the features necessary for an MVP.

  1. Homepage
  2. Authentication
  3. Video Pages & Players
  4. Channel Pages
  5. Notifications
  6. Checkout & Billing
  7. Profile Management 
  8. Livestream Capture
  9. Ability to watch from web or mobile

With the initial requirements in place, I worked with my team to build out the key experiences.

And as this was SportsEngine’s first direct-to-consumer product, I created a DTC “theme” for our pre-existing design system, and designed brand new components where applicable. 






 Early Insights 

Alpha Testing


Our team built the alpha version of the viewing product by June 2023, at which time I conducted usability tests on some of the most important workflows.

The tests were not only fun to run but also insightful. I was able to either validate or invalidate any design decisions I wasn’t 100% confident on, and discovered new usability issues along the way.

Two issues I found particularly interesting were:

  1. Authentication Fears: Testers weren’t finding enough value in the pre-authenticated experience of SportsEngine Play to sign up with us
  2. Navigation Confusion: Testers kept expressing the desire for a back button



 Issue 1 

Authentication Fears


We built SportsEngine Play so that anyone can watch a video preview for 30 seconds before being required to sign up or log in.

But we heard a lot of feedback during our usability tests that at the end of the preview, people didn’t want to create an account.

They didn’t know anything about the product, so why should they trust it? There was a sense of fear in the unknown.

I campaigned to make livestreams free to watch for unauthenticated users, but at the time, the business wanted to keep the forced authentication for email capture and marketing reasons. So, we had to put a pin in addressing the authentication issues at the time. Today, we are adding analytics to the authentication funnel to monitor drop-offs and setting up A/B tests for forced authentication vs. encouraged authentication.







 Issue 2 

Navigation Confusion


The second issue (the desire for a back button) revealed to us that users were not confident in their exact place in the product at a given time, and that we needed to put more thought into the navigation experience and site architecture.




Object-oriented UX


Object-oriented UX: Design objects before actions



Humans naturally think of the world in terms of objects. When playing a soccer game, you’re concerned with finding the ball and kicking it into a goal. The ball (object) is what you’re after. Finding and kicking are the secondary actions you take onto the ball. Similarly, object-oriented UX is the process of first planning a system of interacting objects and information before planning the actions a user takes on those objects.

In order to improve site architecture and navigation, I ran a few OOUX workshops with my product team to:

  1. Define the main objects that each persona will be looking for when coming to SportsEngine Play.
  2. Define the core content and metadata for each object (the key characteristics that make the object unique)
  3. Define the actions/verbs that each persona will want to take on each object




Using OOUX to create channel hierarchies






Video Pages


OOUX informed us about how we should structure video pages. Key core content (which also happen to be nested objects) includes the teams playing in the event and which tournament the event is part of (if applicable). We were able to build an experience that linked to all of these nested objects. We also used this nesting structure to create a wayfinding system of breadcrumbs (State / Organization or School Name / Team Name / Event Title).





Team Channels


If the main objects that users are searching for within SportsEngine Play are sporting events, then the nested objects associated with those sporting events might be: the teams playing in that event and the sport they are playing. The core content associated with those sporting events are date & time (aka: is it live/upcoming or a replay). This is the data that informed the structure of our team channels.



School & Org Channels


We realized that school & organization channels were really just a means for navigation rather than the end goal for a user. A school channel should inherit all of the content from the teams under its umbrella and organize those teams and content by sport. The “All” section should house the most heavily-weighted (timely + popular) content across all teams in the school, while the tabs serve as filters.

How that plays out: If I’m watching a livestream of a Wester Middle School girls volleyball game, I can now use breadcrumb navigation to check out the entire Wester Middle School channel, click on the “Cross Country” tab and then see it filter down to all Wester Middle School cross country teams and events, and navigate to one of those pages.






Category Channels


We created another way of browsing by building category channels. A user can explore a sport category to find all content related to that sport in one place. If I were to navigate to the volleyball category, I’ll find not only all of the volleyball teams and organizations on SportsEngine Play, but also volleyball-related shows such as training videos with Kerri Walsh Jennings.




OOUX: Impact, Surprises & Future


Ultimately, OOUX helped us improve our channel structures and hierarchies (also improving SEO), add alternate forms of navigation throughout the product, and implement better wayfinding UI.

Not only did OOUX reveal how we might organize the content on our site, it also revealed features that we might need to backlog, such as  defining a “fan” as an object that an admin can take an action on (i.e. add or remove from their channel); or an “athlete” as an object that can be tagged to games and that a fan can follow.

As we continue to iterate SportsEngine Play, we are referring back to OOUX to:

  • Add filters 
  • Improve our search experience
  • Improve our weightint of content
  • Improve suggestion algorithm
  • Further identify and categorize content types