Sports Illustrated'siOS and AndroidApps
July 2015–January 2016
Problem
As Sports Illustrated’s website was suffering due to performance and user experience issues, SI did not have a native app for its regular user base to turn. Further complicating matters, SI was growing stale and all-too-commonly recognized only for its print magazine.
Solution
SI’s first foray into a mobile app for iOS and Android sought to spotlight ground-breaking SI content while creating new opportunities for user personalization and customized push notifications, as well as begin to chip away at the notion of SI as only a (quickly outdated) magazine.
My Role
Design Co-Lead
Along with my design partner in crime, Nic Lanzillo, we tackled the user experience flow and interface design of the apps. I focused on navigation (divering where necessary to accommodate platform guidelines), the sports data integrations, and high-fidelity prototyping for the more complex interactions.
High Fidelity Prototyping
One of the trickiest interaction design challenges in the app was the pinned game feature, and it's relationship to picture-in-picture video. Since static comps just wouldn't cut it here, I dove into Pixate to explore different directions in real-time on a device. Here's the final prototype to play around with.
Bridging the Engineering Gap
I also led our design team's collaboration with our iOS and Android engineers. Due to our organizational structure, these engineers are part of a separate team. In the past, this often led to miscommunication and subpar products, so this time around I made sure to sit with them, check-in regularly, occassionally dive into the codebase, and most importantly, ask for their ideas and feedback as platform experts.
Sports Data Deep Dive
Concurrently, I worked closely with our other engineering team that was creating a brand new sports data API. Throughout the product design and development process, I made sure to stay in close communication with them as we uncovered and accounted for all the sneaky edges cases that happen all too regularly across the major sport and leagues.