Halftime Hero 1

Videos and Players

Halftime was an early stage start up that built a community app for sports fans. The app had a wide range of features ranging from community posts and comments, to highlights and news, to live chats and audio. Below, I will show an outline of my process for how I increased user engagement by designing for users' interest in videos and players.

Problem

User engagement was low and UGC was often times uninspiring

Goal

Improve user engagement

Role

Sole product designer working with two cofounders and three developers

Outcome

Improvement in MAUs, Average Session Length, and Session Interval

Survey

We had several hypotheses for why user engagement was low, our biggest one being if we get users’ content from their favorite players and more highlights in front of them, then we will improve user engagement. To validate these hypotheses, I created and sent out surveys that were completed by 50 churned users and 50 active users.

Survey Takeaways

  • Players are just as important as teams
  • NBA Players are followed the most
  • Respondents consume a lot of highlights
  • Respondents share a lot of highlights

Competitive Landscape

Since users were currently consuming highlights primarily through social media apps, I carefully studied the experiences across all of the popular apps in an attempt to decipher what may work best for us.

Social Screenshots

Ideation

Armed with our survey data, my cofounder and I got together to ideate. We specifically focused on two questions:

  1. How do we integrate more video content into the app?
  2. How do we make NBA player content more accessible for users?

Coming out of ideation, my cofounder and I decided we wanted to explore 2 different design concepts and test them against each other.

Prototype A

After a few meetings and iterations with my team, I designed both versions in high fidelity and created prototypes in figma to user test against each other. Prototype A, below, showcases a carousel of highlights on the home screen that functions similarly to instagram stories. The design also allows users' to easily access their favorite players and teams in a carousel on the home screen.

Prototype B

Prototype B, below, separates the players and teams carousels on the home screen and features a separate tab for endless video highlight scrolling. The videos in the feed feature a full screen experience with more control that feels similar to Twitter and Youtube.

User Testing Findings

We tested the designs with 20 active Halftime users and found that certain elements from both prototypes performed well while others did not.

(Left) Testers were able to navigate and interact with the single carousel that featured players and teams just as easily as the dual carousel approach.

(Middle) Testers also gravitated towards vertically scrolling on the player page to view videos rather than the horizontal carousel.

(Right) The testers enjoyed interacting with the highlight carousel on the home screen but they also preferred having the full screen video experience that gave them more control.

User Testing Findings

Final Design

The final shipped design ended up marrying the best parts of both designs. The shipped product ended up significantly improving engagement across DAUs, MAUs, ASL, and SI.