The Athletic is an online sports publication owned by the New York Times.
As a Senior Product Designer, I was responsible for creating the UX research strategy and framework to test new features and hypotheses with existing and potential customers, creating box scores and journeys on how to display scores for different sports codes in the app and public website and the creation and implementation of the first design system in the company, aligning with the engineering team’s design system.
I worked closely with the product management team, collecting user requirements, automating and systematising processes for the newsroom to enhance their ability to quickly post news and stories in the app and website.
I started by creating a roadmap and action plan on how to implement a new research strategy. We selected the most important features and challenges we had been facing as a team, and created hypothesis and goals for each element.
We then proceeded to create target audiences and demographics to reach out to. We contacted out users directly via in-app alerts, email marketing and via our social channels. We created user segments via a survey our users had to fill out prior to being interviewed.
We then held the interviews, collecting notes on a virtual board using FigJam, and mind mapped all the results to create a report. Finally, we reported our findings to the head of product and the rest of the team, helping direct our efforts.
The goal was to integrate an in-game experience for our app and website. We conducted a thorough competitor analysis, to understand best practices and started wireframing our own version of box scores.
We created many iterations of lo-fi and hi-fi designs and prototypes, and with the support of the product and design team, we created what is now the box scores in the app and website.
I spearheaded the efforts to create the design team first design system to help us improve our Design Ops efforts, increasing speed of execution and operations.
I audited all our design files and collected all the components, collating them in a centralised Design System.