Sky Technology's base moved from London to Leeds in 2016, where I fulfilled the first dedicated UX Design role within the Sky Sports Design team. Expectations were high to redesign two multi-million user base apps, namely the Football Score Centre app & flagship Sky Sports IOS app within the space of a year. Integrating UX methodologies into a UI focused team, who had hesitations what value a UX specialist can bring, would be initial key objectives to prove the investment in the position.
Contextual prioritisation throughout the football weekend of key components to increase user engagement. Sky Sports Football Score Centre App.
In my first week, I created an 8 step guide to integrating UX into the current product development lifecycle, introducing the key touch points I'd be most valuable. Furthermore, I organised and facilitated the entire SCRUM team in workshops to enable an inclusive design process, to ideate opportunities, technology limitations and share known customer pain points. The workshops were successful in two ways, providing a clear validation plan for upcoming projects, but more importantly allowing each team member to have a sense of ownership of the product direction.
Following the workshops, I evaluated existing tools that would enable cost effective data gathering, finding 3 tools I could utilise under existing Sky licenses; UserZoom - a survey and click testing tool, Optimizely - which enabled A/B & Multivariate Tests and Omniture - a data analysis tool. After months of sharing customer insights with senior management, I proposed budgets for qualitative research, learning first hand from customers in user interviews, validating prototypes against business success criteria and usability to derisk projects before a line of code was written.
Sky’s most downloaded app and the UK’s most popular football app on IOS & Android, having millions of active users each month, was to undertake a full redesign in 2016 taking it away from a mobile-web experience to a native app on both platforms. On launch the app ratings on IOS increased from 2.4 to 4.1 out of 5, while on Android increased from 3.2 to 4.4 out of 5.
The flagship Sky Sports app was second in line for a major redesign. Leveraging enhancements made launching the FSC app, we ensured interactions and usability were consistent with the newly implemented HIG design system.
Ideation sketches of stakeholders vision & Prioritising phase 1 features.
Sky Sports Germany were granted funding to create a brand new online experience to complement the UK's dominance. The project allowed for new platforms and codebases, including CMS upgrades and would eventually feed into the UK site so it was important the User Experience was tailored for the UK & German market.
Co-owner of the skysports.com A/B testing strategy to showcase the revenue lost due to usability and showcase the value of contextual advertising without harming the user experience. Due to lack of resource, I would develop the tests using HTML, CSS & JQuery and integrate with Optimizely, the A/B testing software.
