MANCHESTER CITY

Some exploration had taken place and Andy (who was covering responsive web and tickets) had done a brilliant job in setting the early vision. I got to know the product team (all super nice) and set about looking at the potential architecture of the app. There was a huge amount of information available, news for all the City teams (men's, women's and academy), behind the scenes, video, fan zones, tickets, shop and more.

I did some competitor analysis and looked at other apps which were handling large amounts of information and how they did it. It was clear we would need a large news section but everything else was up for grabs.

I worked very closely with Matt (Product owner) and we sketched various groupings of content out. It helped that Matt was a huge City fan, his knowledge of what was available was second to none. He also showed very good judgement with what he felt fans would want. We would validate this later with research but his experience and passion got us on the right track quickly.

I explored the initial iterations of a horizontal scrolling menu. This approach would become the bedrock of the app. Allowing us to surface huge amounts of information in an easily understandable way. This gave us one part of the solution but we had the match-day issue to solve. How should the app flex to reflect a live event?

We explored the concept of a dynamic home screen. The intention was that "cards" would be displayed at timely and relevant points. During a match, promos to the Match-day centre would be shown, where you could listen, follow text commentary or watch the match. These promos provided takeover moments of the home screen but you could still access all the news and videos in the other sections or by scrolling down the home stream. As a principle, this seemed to work well but we still had the challenge of how to accommodate different team interests on the home screen. We wanted to provide the women's team with as big a platform as the men's team but we had to identify how to manage those times when the information for both teams would compete with each other. The truth is that not everyone is interested in both teams and/or the academy.

One potential solution amongst others was that we would provide the option to customise your home screen as part of the onboarding. A simple screen to identify the news you wanted to receive on the homepage.

Customisation is problematic, previous experience shows that users are unlikely to spend a long time setting up a page to their liking. So we put a simple engaging screen as part of onboarding... "Choose the teams you want to follow."

By having this choice upfront we gave the women's team an equal platform as the men's. It would be up to the user to decide how they set up their home stream, Men's, Women's, Academy or all.

I spoke to a recruitment agency and got 6 users available for a lab session. We had no lab no budget to pay for it so between me and Andy we set up our own. Three webcams, screen recording software and mics were all used.

We set our research objectives and began running the sessions. I'm aware of the dangers of confirmation bias so arranged for the in-house marketing research team to facilitate the sessions. This was the first time they'd been exposed to UX research and they all seemed to thoroughly enjoy it.

With this approach, we were able to save a lot of money which meant we had more money to run more sessions. We did this throughout the lifecycle of the project to great success. The product team loved seeing some of their ideas come to life and get that instant feedback from users.