SportsEngine.com
SportsEngine.com has evolved into the home of youth sports. What began as a B2B landing page has now grown into a portal for millions of users, over 120,000+ organizations, program listings for 100+ sports, and thousands of curated articles for coaches, athletes, and families.
Our team was responsible for bridging all the different technologies under one roof, determining strategy, and building a unified user experience for front and back end users. I worked with our Creative Director to help the design team by driving strategy, defining requirements for new features, managing workflow, and providing creative direction.
Roles: Website Strategy, UX/UI Design
Creative Direction by Kyle Strash; In collaboration with Design Robin Marquardt; Operations: Greta Vann; Copywriter: Zak Schneider
Goals
Unify the SportsEngine.com experience by creating a flexible, integrated ecosystem. Create a scalable set of consistent components. Make them easy to design with, easy to code, and easy to use.
Increase traffic & engagement by providing a variety of relevant sports-related content along the user journey, ensure return visits to allow for sponsorship and monetization opportunities.
Improve content contributor and marketing efficiency by developing a product that allows admins to publish templates, modules, and configurations without the help of a developer.
Challenges
Working within a single website project timeline while simultaneously developing the product’s back-end components, configurations, and future considerations.
Strategy
Building from the ground up meant we needed to determine all features, components, and functions of the product. Our team spent the first months of the project working with stakeholders auditing the content types to account for. As our Creative Director began wireframes, I was responsible for helping define technical requirements for our development team to build. We started with infrastructure and the Drupal ecosystem, then prioritized features and components into order of the workflow of when our content contributors needed to gain access to migrate content. As part of our broader goal, we resolved pattern and styling inconsistencies by merging our existing component libraries to align more closely with our product styling.
Define Requirements
In the last half of 2019, we focused shifted to preparing for launch. I was responsible for helping define requirements, content migration and QA workflow, and providing specifications for developers to build. In collaboration with the Creative Director, we successfully completed over 30 components, defined, QA’d, and documented guides for over 100+ components.
Design System
A crucial part of building and growing the product was establishing a design system. I worked with our Creative Director to help maintain our design principles, documentation, and workflows to increase efficiency and consistency across our product.
