My Role
As the Head of Design, I took it upon myself to take on a design project that had been reprioritized because of a lack of resources – I became that much needed design resource and led UX strategy and design on a full revamp of an existing platform, from research through delivery.
Problem I Was Solving
The Competition Manager had been neglected for years. A major NCAA partnership forced the issue — the tool needed to go from a football-only desktop web app to a responsive, multi-sport platform ready for one of the biggest sports organizations in the US, fast.
Challenges
Six months to support basketball, American football, volleyball, and hockey — each with their own operational nuances. The core functionality was largely locked, so the work focused on responsiveness, UI quality, navigation improvements, and new permission flows without breaking what existing clients already depended on.
Outcomes
The revamped platform launched in time for the NCAA partnership and expanded Genius Sports’ reach across multiple sports markets. A unified component library dramatically accelerated design and development turnaround. One competition manager summed it up well — the tool allowed them to do away with traditional paperwork entirely across pre-tournament operations.
Context
The Multi-Sport Competition Manager is a tool sitting at the heart of Genius Sports’ sports management platform. It allows for leagues to manage their competitions from end to end. It provides a centralized source of truth for competition calendars, rosters, individual player information, team management and integration with our LiveStats tool, as well as popular solutions like FIBA Connect and others.
The tool had been neglected for years, and Genius Sport’s deal with the NCAA drove some deeper interest into giving it much needed attention. While functionality was set in stone, and we couldn’t change too much about the core platform, so we added plenty of quality-of-life improvements, a better more rich user interface and customization controls.
“Genius Sports has immensely improved our competition operation, allowing us to do away with the traditional paperwork in relation to pre-tournament organisations such as squad registration, scheduling and registration. Overall, the CMS has enhanced the operations of the PFL through its efficient and user-friendly interface.”
Mikhail Ku Torre
Competitions Manager
Philippines Football League
Challenges:
Going mobile – there was a huge demand to turn this archaic web tool into a responsive web application that was accessible on any modern mobile device. We had to completely refactor the core views and templates to accommodate for responsiveness and a mobile experience.
Multi-sport – the first tool was only available for Football (soccer) leagues – we had to quickly develop an adaptive mutli-sport experience within a timeline of about 6 months – As our first customer would be the NCAA, and that deal was closed and they were waiting. The UX team responded quickly to survey and research the needs of the NCAA, consult with subject matter experts on every sport we were aiming to support; basketball, American football, volleyball and hockey.
Optimizing Menu Items
Using our Football Competition Manager as a model, we optimized menu items and flow to better serve the user’s core behaviors and to decrease clutter.
Creating New Flows
We tried as much as we could to keep the same core experience, but some sections ended up feeling more broken the more we fixed elsewhere. Most notably were the permission levels that were introduced alongside the UI changes. These additions allowed for different types of users (in this case – competition manager and club admin) There needs to be a series of checks and balances to make sure that valid data is passing through the system. We created a couple mechanisms to ensure that there was a two step verification process involving two types of users in the Competition Population flow.
Data Filters and Sorting
The ease of accessing important data become very important when we introduced more than one sport into the system. Because of legacy technical restraints and the need to keep certain API data sets intact (for retrieval by external systems) we needed to allow for better data filtering on the front-end. Ultimately empowering the user to create reports and views for a single sport, or multiple sports; the needs varied from client to client. This would also make it easier to retrieve and edit data for competitions by date, sport, team makeup and other options.
The Dashboard View
This was probably the most ambitious view – the legacy tool was missing a dashboard, a center for information at quick glance and a place to lead the user to the most used activities and actions.
Selected Screens
The UX team went through and redesigned many screens, unifying around a single component repository and UI kit. This made turn around on all of our design changes much faster. The development teams were able to “re-skin” most of the legacy UI and easily create new components and views as new templates were defined.
