Scout media
Role
Senior UX Design
Date
2014 – 2015
Business goal
Design a sports media site that showcases the many super fan subsites.
Success metric
Increase traffic to site.
Worked with
CEO, PM, and Front End Dev
Research
I have to admit that I am not the biggest sports fanatic. So when I joined Scout I needed to roll up my sleeves and jump into some gorilla user research. I reached out to my network of ux colleagues and got mentored by some usability professionals in Seattle.
I ran my own unmoderated usability tests on usertesting.com. Testing out various aspects of the Scout site, I also ran some site visit interviews of users on the Scout site. This was a powerful learning experience and gave me insights about the superfans that use the site.
Rethinking navigation for Scout
Problem: Scout was billing itself as a network made up of many local individual sites. These individual sites had a set of navigation links as well. As well as their own color palette, think of all the individual college universities each of these sites represents. As the Scout navigation evolved into something more modern, these micro sites started to feel more like an ignored stepchild. These mini sites were crucial to maintaining Scout’s large user base. A new navigation was needed.
Goals:
1. Scalable, to allow for network growth.
2. Discoverability, to increase cross pollination and awareness of the vast network.
Process: I started by doing some competitive analysis of other network sites and researching how they approach this issue. I also took stock of all the areas within the Scout network. I jumped into wireframes to explore some initial ideas. I also ran a card sort test to help validate some of the category groupings. I then iterated on various designs, while also gathering feedback from the Scout leadership team. I created prototypes on which I was able to run usability testing. In the end we went with a mega menu which gave us a clean and elegant navigation that complemented the individual micro sites.
Design
I illustrated out things as wireframes to show the various cases for the navigation.
Desktop wireframe
Mobile wireframe
Snapshot of Scout projects
Being a startup, there was a long list of things that I worked on at Scout. I designed for all aspects of the site, from the Forums to the Scout app.
ScoutScope
A dynamic database that catalogs the performance of athletes as they move from high school to college to the pro leagues. I helped to design the tool to access this information as well as integrate it with the Scout site.
Forums
Helped to update the design of the outdated Forums pages that many of the micro sites used.
Scout App
Designed an app version of the Scout network.