Personal
Yahoo Sports
Designer
2024
Context
The NBA Draft
The day of the NBA Draft is my favorite day of the year. As an avid NBA fan, I'm fascinated by watching players fulfill their dreams and witnessing the league's future taking shape in just one day.
Along with other fans, I enjoy researching and evaluating top prospects leading up to the event. Delving into players' backgrounds and considering factors such as positional fit, potential, and character is both super fun and fascinating.
There are numerous online sources that offer draft content providing detailed analyses of prospects. Exploring different mock drafts and guides can be engaging as they offer a diverse range of opinions and perspectives about the draft.
Yahoo Sports is one sports media platform that offers this type of coverage. However, after digging in deeper, I've noticed a gap specifically regarding information about upcoming NBA prospects that they haven't expanded on much. I wanted to address this issue and saw it as a fun opportunity to take on.
Note: I'm not affiliated with Yahoo Sports and all opinions in this case study are my own.
Problem
Yahoo Sports contains little information about draft prospects
With the NBA Draft's viewership increasing in recent years, it's important for major sports media platforms to offer insightful draft content that engages fans. Many of these platforms provide extensive coverage to help fans learn about prospects. For instance, The Ringer releases a comprehensive draft guide every year and ESPN offers detailed insights into top prospects.
However, while Yahoo Sports does provide draft coverage, it lacks the depth one might expect from a major platform.
Gaining deeper insights on prospects is challenging. Selecting a player from the mock draft page redirects users to their college profile, where the only draft-related information is a small widget projecting their potential team. For international prospects, the information on their profile is pretty much nonexistent.
This contrast is quite stark when comparing against competitive platforms like The Ringer and ESPN, which provide detailed draft profiles that offer unique insights and analyses on prospects.
Goals
Updating player profiles with more useful and engaging content
I looked to update these player profiles with more relevant content specifically related to the draft. By updating these, Yahoo Sports could benefit from:
An increase in user engagement
An increase in DAUs
Establishing themselves as a leader in the sports media space
A few things to note about this project:
I planned to focus only on the NBA, but also intended to create reusable patterns that could be used in other professional leagues like the NFL, WNBA, and MLB in the future.
Given the limited three-day timeframe, I'd be making several assumptions in these designs, while in a real-world project, I'd allocate more time for research and validation.
Due to time constraints, I chose to focus exclusively on iOS native.
Persona
Designing for the Sports Enthusiast
The primary user type I intended to focus on was the sports enthusiast wanting to familiarize themselves with prospects leading up to the draft. Since these users engage with this content more as a hobby rather than professionally, I looked to avoid long, text-heavy scouting reports. Instead, brief player analyses that could be understood quickly at a glance was more suitable.
Final Concepts
Adding engaging draft content to player profiles
I added a Draft page to player profiles, which provides more comprehensive draft content.
This update expands on the small widget previously on profiles to include content like projected team, player analysis, combine stats, and comparable players positionally.
I chose to make this page the default page that would only be active during draft season—similar to how the widget functions. By this time, most players would be viewed in an NBA context and users would likely be interested in engaging with this type of content.
Offering different ways to view and compare prospects
I updated the player board to also include a Big Board ranking.
Unlike a mock draft ranking, this list ranks players independent of teams' draft positions, which is a popular way of viewing player rankings. Additionally, I added a filtering feature that allows users to sort prospects by position, offering another way to narrow down searches and identify comparable prospects.
Updating team profiles
Similar to player profiles, team profiles only featured a small widget displaying their mock draft selections and lacked comprehensive draft content.
To address this, I introduced a Draft page to team profiles.
Unlike player profiles, I opted not to make the Draft page default for team profiles, since I assumed users would be less likely to seek extensive draft coverage from there. However, the draft widget (which I visually updated) still remains on the default page for visibility without being too intrusive.
Accessibility
Ensuring that accessibility standards are met
With the introduction of new elements, I made sure that all visual components adhered to the WCAG color contrast ratio guidelines.
Reflection
Final thoughts
This exercise was fun as it provided me with an opportunity to work on something I felt passionate about. Although I would have liked to spend more time on research and explorations, I'm satisfied with the results achieved in such a short timeframe.
If this were a real-world project, my next steps would be to test these updates and gather insights into engagement performance. Based on the findings, I would then make any necessary adjustments.
As mentioned earlier, I believe this framework has potential to extend beyond the NBA to other professional leagues as well. There's a growing need for more engaging draft content as leagues, such as the NFL, continue to increase in viewership every year.
One thing to keep in mind about this update is its dependency on a draft expert to contribute to the analyses of individual prospects. At Yahoo Sports, this role could potentially be filled by Krysten Peek, who already creates NBA mock drafts every year. With these updated profiles, the responsibilities of a draft expert may need to expand to include more detailed analyses and ratings of prospects.