RYADA24

Mar 2018

Egyptian soccer news portal needs to compete with FilGoal.

RYADA24

  1. Ground Zero

    Just a single statement that says: “We need a soccer portal better than filgoal.com in 30 days!” No formal business requiremets provided, so we had to define one.

  2. Research & Development

    Starting by conducting a competitive analysis on the main and obvious competitor filgoal.com, we picked several others, like: reyada.com, goal.com, kooora.com, and espn.com. There’re tons of dimensions to study, but we don’t have time for that, we have to prioritize:

    • Soccer Oriented Features
    • Most of the competitors are lacking detailed game statistics, they stick only to game highlights and timeline, and may be a couple of indicators like: ball possession and shots on goal (found in goal.com), and they leave the rest of stats to their mobile app.

    • Almost none of the competitors are having detailed player statistics, things like: shot/pass accuracy, performace, dribble, .. etc. just the basic attributes, biography, and related news.

    • Absent innovation when it comes to multiple game resuts, and how users find them through site-wide navigation. It seems like the cmoponenet prouced by FilGoal.com is the trending one, yet there’s no obvious reason why they emphasize on game status a loit more han the actual score and game related stats!

    • When it comes to competitions and teams, the news part dominates the view by most competitors, except FilGoal.com, which tries to combine team standings, game results, and scorers, but poorly designed.

  3. Research & Development

    The journey continues with competitors, but this time we focus on the news part. Especially that our client has nothing but news delivery features so far. Well, there’s nothing special about news posts these days, you’ll find it’s very basic model exactly the same across all news portals. So we decided to bring on a few soccer fans to the table by surveying their interest.

    • News Oriented Features
    • Most fans are more interested in news when it comes to their favorite players and teams, in addition to hot games of course in active competitions.

    • Speaking of soccer portals, news must have more than basic textual content and related posts. There must be a cross reference to related games, copetitions, teams, and players. Which are not perfectly covered by most competitors.

    • User simply hate advertising! Bad for business no doubt, but the challenge is not having a portal without ad spots at all, the point is to organize those in a smart way that does not block the user view or forces him/her to close it just to get to the content. About 99% of our contributed fans share the same opinion, and all of them are using AdBlock extensions!

    • All competitors are using third-party comments, mainly disqus and facebook.

  4. Content Modeling

    The clock is ticking, we needed to define the basic entities and their relation to each other, in an effort to build the IA (Information Architecture) for the whole project.

    “information.architecture.v0.4”
  5. Blueprinting

    It’s time to craft the skeleton, it’s too early to do it indeed, but we’re desperate for a business requirements, we needed feedback from our selected fans in an effort to design proper user journeys.

  6. First Wireframe

    Starting at the end, we’ve designed the wireframes for the news section after reviewing our IA about 4 times. Followed by the rest of view to form a total of 24 unique wireframe.

    “homepage.v0.3” “homepage.menu.matches.v0.2” “homepage.menu.competitions.v0.4” “game.index.v0.2” “game.overview.v0.3” “competition.index.v0.1” “competition.team.standings.v0.2” “competition.latest.results.v0.2” “competition.game.schedule.v0.3” “competition.scorers.v0.2” “competition.related.news.v0.2” “competition.gallery.v0.2” “team.overview.v0.1” “team.roster.v0.1” “team.latest.results.v0.1” “team.game.schedule.v0.2” “team.related.news.v0.1” “team.gallery.v0.1” “player.overview.v0.2” “player.statistics.v0.2” “player.biography.v0.2” “player.related.news.v0.2” “player.gallery.v0.2” “news.index.v0.1” “news.post.v0.3”
  7. Testable Prototype

    After amending wireframes, which is usually the longest phase due to rounds and rounds of feedback and refinement. We’re ready to put it all together into an interactive prototype for user testing. The results were super, our fans liked the way we introduced the combination between their interest in game stats and related news. We did reserve 30% of important views for soccer stats, and the rest is merely about news.

    “interactive.prototype.v0.2”
  8. Switching Seats

    Back to the beginning, we have our own insights and our oun stakeholders (selected fans), we can stop right there and use that information as an outsiders, by re-interviewing our stakeholders in conjunction with the marketing funnel to define the missing business requirements, and we have!

  9. User Journeys

    Yes, it’s more clear now, the relation between business and user, and it led us to invent new features! First, and for the first time, we were able to write our Problem Statement, then we create the User Hypothesis, and from that emerged our POV (Point Of View), the result is a very intersting User Journeys. Unfortunately, our client have pushed our recommended features to the next release of the portal for time sakes. We have a limited window to deliver the final template.

    “user.journeys.tracking.games.v0.1” “user.journeys.tracking.news.v0.1”
  10. Mockups

    Time is running out, definitely we’re going to be a bit late, but that’s ok with our client, we have to deliver by the 5 week anyway. At a lightening speed, we have selected the style we’re going to use, fonts, colours, and other libraries. and the homepage mockup with main navigation were ready for our client approval.

  11. The Template

    Finally, we have it, the full responsive frontend template for our soccer portal. We did more than our best to make that super competitive compared to all other portals.

  12. Final Delivery

    Feedback came out great, with minimal amendments, took no longer than 3 days, and we’re done!

    “frontend.template.v0.1”
  13. Post-Final Delivery

    Super! We’ve applied our recommended features for the next release of the portal, now we’re going to have a unique edge among competitors, which is enabling our users to follow competitions, teams, and players.

    “frontend.template.v0.2”