Sportle is an online sports curation website and mobile app. Based on your saved cable credentials, Sportle showed you all the available online sports content you can access. There were multiple states for games: prior, during, and active. If the time was prior to the game’s start date, you can set a reminder to be notified when the game starts. During the game, you can watch the stream or track the score. If the game was finished, you could access the scores, details, and highlights.
My Role
Sportle was a startup with a team of 5 (Founder, Co-founder/Head of Product, Marketer, Engineer, Native Engineer) when I joined. I was tasked to lead the design efforts and help with some front-end. When I initially started the website was still in beta and the native app was still being developed. I came in, conducted a heuristic review of what existed, and helped implement new features to go live and deliver favorable experiences.
Project Process
Upon launching we started promoting our site on various social media platforms when games were live. We saw incremental increases in created accounts and return viewers. In order to help prioritize direction we reached out to our customers for feedback on their experience with our platform. This feedback was analyzed and led to what would be worked on. When designing new features, we’d come together and discuss what we thought would solve the identified problems. I would then research competitors or connect with users on how they were solving that problem currently. I’d then create wireframes demonstrating my proposed solution. The team would then come together to give feedback, discuss the direction forward, and estimate how long it’d take to be built.
After figuring the logistics, we’d go into development. We used SourceTree to version our work. I’d create a branch and code the front-end, the engineer would then come in and use my branch to connect the back-end and add any logic necessary. This would then be merged into a master branch that would be pushed live when ready.
Key Features
Home/Browse
From the initial launch, we show featured games. Featured games are games that are close in score, are popular, or have some form of significance. After that, we show games based on favorites. The user can select favorite sports or teams. Then the sports are shown in alphabetical order. The user can also quickly filter sports or show all free sports. If the user is signed in and has a cable provider saved, they can see all the games they can access as well.
About Sportle
To help build trust between our company and the customers, we created an about page that described what Sportle does, how to use it, and some other benefits of using the platform.
Blog
Using Wordpress I helped create a blog used to connect with customers about updates and helpful tips on how to use our platform.
Event Detail
We created an event detail page that allowed users to set reminders for upcoming games, watch and see scores for live games, and see stats for games that had ended.
Stream
On the stream page, we left it completely open to the broadcaster. The only section we had was the header bar which showed other live sports and a share button that allowed the user to post the game onto their social media.
Olympic Mode
During the Olympics, we created a special section that showed the Olympic sports.
Fantastic Finishes
We introduced “Fantastic Finishes” to highlight games that were close with little time remaining.
Project Results
I helped push Sportle from beta to a live product with a growing user base. Within the first few months after going live, we struggled to maintain servers because of the 1000+ people using our site at once. We successfully optimized the site and launched a new model for the Olympics. I was able to improve the user experience of the site, thus resulting in a higher percentage of return users.