MARCH MADNESS LIVE
The March Madness program is massive. It consists of over 14 digital products across the entire suite allowing fans to watch all 67 tournament games live and nearly the same number of experiences for picking your brackets. The team is responsible for the entire tournament experience on iOS, Android & Windows handsets and tablet apps, responsive web designs, set top box apps (Apple TV, Roku, Chromecast), Amazon Alexa skills, Apple watch and VR. While in the past I’ve worked on the entire suite of app experiences, sales, marketing and social efforts, this season I was focusing on the Live responsive web player (MML Live) and bracket picking experiences only.
Goal
Being primarily driven by advertising and video views, the constant metric to build upon for the business is more video starts and longer engagement. How can we do that while still giving fans what they seek and make the experience more enjoyable?
Turner Sports Team in partnership with the nCAA
Creative Director: Randy D.
UX Lead: Luther Lotz
Design Director: Jeff G.
Product Designer: Gabi D.
Product Manager: Trent L.
Development: Matt S. Chip H.
Process Overview
Every year seeking out new ways to improve the experience to meet varying KPIs has been critical for growth. Fundamentally the team begins with a known foundation that was created from the season prior. Using that previously established groundwork we created, I chose to start the team off through some ideation sessions (crazy eights) to see what features could be improved upon based on new research we collected. We then voted on the more popular concepts and then it was off to the drawing board to refine those ideas. We explored various layouts and a few micro animations and then began testing with a small sample of unbiased participants we recruited. Recruitment was done through an online survey. Once those ideas underwent more scrutiny by our internal stakeholders, we began higher fidelity prototyping and testing sessions. The prototypes were used to do both in-person local testing plus some remote testing for fans in other regions.
DESKTOP LIVE PLAYER
Initial version for a new LIVE player
Results
Once the product was out in market we saw over 26m live video starts (up 16%), 12% increase in minutes watched and a 31% increase in VOD consumption surpassing the goals we set out with. This project was fun to work on and resulted in our team’s first Emmy win!
A glimpse into the Event Ops Center
This is where the products are monitored and adjusted during live events