A proposed version of a revised B/R LIVE home screen
Problem
Bleacher Report LIVE began as a service called Catch Sports. Catch helped fans locate where their favorite teams’ games were being broadcast, while B/R LIVE is a video streaming service. When B/R LIVE first launched, it still retained its Catch DNA and showed info on all games, not just the ones it was streaming. This created a ton of confusion for fans and added unnecessary overhead from a technical perspective.
Goal
Craft a home screen for the mobile app that emphasizes watching video and allows for a variable display of content.
Current State
The main screen highlighted games that you COULDN’T watch on B/R LIVE
Process
I did the usual competitive research and looked at all manner of streaming services, but I wanted to do more to include the overall team in the concepting. I decided to run a Design Studio to get everyone’s creative juices flowing.
I took a page from Jared Spool’s playbook and leveraged his “Despicable Design” exercise. The idea is to make people think about what would make the experience the worst it could possibly be. Everyone knows bad design when they see it, so I asked the 6 teams of 5 people each to put on their evil genius hats and do their worst.
One of the sillier ideas from the Despicable Design session — use butterflies and flowers to highlight women’s sports!
After talking and sharing about what would make the experience terrible, I then flipped the exercise and asked how we could make things the best it could be. I re-shuffled the teams and conducted a Crazy 8’s exercise to quickly generate ideas.
Some mobile sketches from the Crazy 8’s exercise
Two main themes emerged: creating a stronger experience that displays games with video ONLY and gets more games on the screen at once, making it easier for a user to tap on the game they want to watch.
I created wireframes that hit on both themes, and worked with our UX Research team to get an initial reaction to our ideas.
The prototype can be found at: https://sse6ra.axshare.com/
Results / Next Steps
Users clearly understood that the red play buttons meant that they could watch video here. They were beginning to understand that the smaller card types were denoting something different, but they weren’t exactly sure what. We have some more work to do to more clearly delineate which events you can watch on B/R LIVE and which ones you can’t.
This compliment confirmed that we were heading in the right direction. :
“The app was really easy to use and I like how it offered different ways you could watch the game.”