US Open Redesign
Design Director, UX
Project Overview
Our mission was to foster an evolution of access in order for users to transcend the experience of the television broadcast — arming viewers with the capability to access a complimentary, info-driven experience anytime, anywhere.
The USTA made a seemingly straightforward ask: overhaul their “behind the times” online experience. And while we initially planned for a more minimalistic approach, we’d later change course due to the sheer complexity of the project and volume of information users would access. We decided that clearly establishing an information hierarchy would be the foundation of the effort to keep the user experience intuitive, sleek and consistent across all elements from fonts even down to sponsors’ logo size.
Process
To begin moving toward the goals for the update, we started mapping out all of the content sections and their hierarchy for the pre-tournament, tournament in progress, and post-tournament. This process began with the top-level overview, and proceeded to a comprehensive accounting of the content sections and child pages until every aspect of the site was accounted for. This, as with any project, began with the team in a room with mellow beats in the background, a lot of markers, and three white-boarding walls. It eventually morphed into something more organized, as seen below.
As Design Director on this project, I was able to lead AND meaningfully contribute to all aspects of the UX brainstorming and white-boarding sessions. After our sessions, the team would split for solo production time where I would also explore UX paths. As we explored and produced wires and styles, we would meet internally for daily reviews with more white-boarding and problem solving where the consistent challenge was, "how do we show the user all of the data in an easy-to-digest-at-a-glance-ada-compliant way?" Wow that is a lot of hyphens, but I want to convey to you the feeling of the complexity we were facing.
Another layer to this was the data we received around tracking / analytics. Mobile devices were the prominent access point fans turned to for tournament information, so we wanted to ensure the fan did not get the feeling content was cut, or congested while on a mobile device. This led us to design with a mobile-first approach, which we presented to the development team and the USTA as part of a user-centered design mindset.
Do you ever notice that during reviews (internal or external), it seems everyone is on the same page, but then reasonable questions seem to manifest after the meeting? Questions to which the answer a designer may want to provide begins with something delightfully snarky to the tune of, "Like we agreed in the meeting..." Well, to avoid indecent thoughts such as these, we notate. The ability to visually depict interaction for clients and development teams can clarify things that; a) may not have been obvious on a static wire, or b) lost in the brain from the vast amount of information we intake in one meeting, let alone one day. On a project of this size, minimizing the possibility for miscommunication proved invaluable.
Now for the polish. For larger teams, the UI styling of the experience will follow a similar process as the UX process. The difference here was that there were no white-boarding sessions for UI and no individual style explorations that would lead to a group of designers reviewing and converging ideas. The team was very helpful with reviews and visual proofing, but the UI design fell onto one designer's shoulders. My challenge: how do I help the designer single-handedly deliver finalized UI comps to the dev team in three weeks without compromising the quality of the creative? The answer: I don't — because collaboration is a cornerstone of creative work reaching it's full potential, especially in a limited time. I was somehow able to convince my peers to gather for impromptu design reviews and ideation.
This helped, but didn't solve the workload or expediency problem, so I took a look at the designer's toolbox. At this point, we had our partner's established brand, approved detailed wires, and the partner's chosen style which they coined as the "dark" direction (referring to the official US Open dark blue we styled each page with). For expediency and creative integrity's sake, I relied on that information as the beacon to help the designer find a way to a timely and successful creative solution.
