Creating The Sports Wire With USA Today
Case Study
About The Project
USA Today Media Group partnered with our team to create a sports news app called The Sports Wire. This app houses USA Today's 50+ vertical sports sites such as CowboysWire, GiantsWire, PatriotsWire, For the Win, Golfweek, etc. The Sports Wire app allows users to personalize their experience by favoriting their most beloved sports teams and topics for a more personalized feed.
The Challenges
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With so many sports news apps out there already (ESPN, The Athletic, Yahoo Sports), how could we stand out amongst the others?
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Our team typically specialized in applications for sports teams & colleges. So how could we use that knowledge to our advantage for a brand new Media/ News vertical?
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SportsWire.com was out dated and had very little web traffic. But USA Today's individual sports sites had high impression rates. This app would essentially reintroduce the brand to a mobile-using audience. So how could we ensure users knew this app was an extension of their go-to sports sites?
Highlighting some popular sites featured in The Sports Wire | image credit
The Proccess
Our team hit the ground running by researching our competitors. In a saturated news market, what were the top dogs doing right and where could we take this opportunity to improve upon? After we examined dozens of news apps, we decided to split them into two categories: 1) One to One and 2) One to Many. For example, apps like CNN and ESPN were considered "One to One", because they were single publishers displaying content in one space. Apps like Apple News and Bleacher Report fell under "One to Many". They were aggregating content from a variety of publishers and displaying them in a single space. We were able to zero in on our scope after determining that The Sports Wire as a "One to Many" app by aggregating their 50+ sites into one hub.
With zero requirements from the client, we were able to experiment with a variety of users flows. Our mission was to create a personalized home feed. But what if our Lakers-loving basketball fanatic also enjoyed staying up to date with all things sports? We decided to create a discover feed that'd allow USA Today editors the ability to highlight latest news, rumors and photo galleries. Using defined UI components enabled us to quickly mock-up a variety of layouts. This made for easy development by simply sharing the pattern sequences.
Our team noticed while comparing apps, slight animations or microinteractions really upped the quality of an app. We decided to dive into studying these subtle transitions or movements. We found our users delighted by the simple animations during testing. These rarely noticed interactions seemed to separate good vs great app experiences.
In order to retain and redirect our current web-viewing Sports Wire fans, our team took on the challenge of creating a digital marketing campaign for the resurrecting brand. We created several email campaigns that blasted millions of USA Today subscribers, as well as landing screens, and individual social campaigns for die-hard fans of each site. We also developed custom smart banners that informed readers of the new app, and took them directly to the app store for download.
Categorizing news apps between One to One vs One to Many
Screenshot of discover feed ui documentation shared with developers
Just a few out of the dozen microinteractions made in Principle
Examples from our digital marketing campaign
The Final Deliverables
Our team created a news reader app, as well as released a multifaceted digital marketing campaign. This project opened so many doors for the future of our product, and challenged us to keep the bar raised high. Our MVP received over 600K+ downloads within the first 30 days. Within that time, The Sports Wire was ranked amongst the top 50 Sports and News apps in the App Store and Play Store, respectively.
Main Takeaways
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The Sports Wire allowed me to design and build an app from start to finish. This was truly a custom app, which challenged our 'platform' based business objectives. But also allowed us to quickly update our existing apps to "SportsWire standards".
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USA Today gave us very little design feedback or product requirements, which was both a blessing and a curse. Is there such thing as the perfect client?