Reimagining a sports statistic platform for the modern user
CLIENT
Baseball Reference with Craft
MY ROLE
Strategic and tactical design direction. Player/team pages, nostalgia designs
TEAM
2 UX designers, 1 researcher
TIMELINE
10 weeks
Sports Reference wants to be the go-to source for sports info, inspiring users to enjoy, understand, and share their favorite sports. While Sports Reference has served a loyal user base for twenty years, they began to experience a challenge in retaining casual users who arrived on the site primarily through search engine results.
Our goal
Rethink the Baseball Reference experience to increase its resonance with more casual users.
Deliver tactical recommendations and conceptual designs based on findings from user research.
Through the user research, we mapped out three phases of opportunities
So to begin approaching the issue of user retention, I first evaluated the current experience to pinpoint areas of improvement.
Near-term (I worked on this one)
Discoverability - Delivering tactical UX changes designed to help users find what they need
Mid-term
Customization - Designing user flows that allow users to tailor content to their interests
Long-term (and I worked on this one)
Nostalgia - Leveraging the breadth of Baseball Reference’s historical data to resonate with the nostalgia users associate with the sport
Testing the concepts with users
After completing the initial round of user interviews, we returned to users with low-fidelity concept screens around the themes of discoverability, customization, and nostalgia.
The goal of this testing was to validate the themes that were identified and iterate on designs to reflect user feedback.
I was primarily responsible for the designs of the player page and nostalgia concepts.
Refining the designs
After testing, we refined our concepts and presented Sports Reference the high-fidelity screens alongside the research findings.
"That gives us a ton of paths to follow for future research. You touched on some things that are on our radar, but also surfaced insightful new strings to pull."
Adam Darowski, Sports Reference
Head of product
Interested in working together? Get in touch!
Tynan Drake
UX Designer
Philadelphia, PA
tynandrake@gmail.com