Commonwealth Games 2018

During my time as a UX designer at RNZ I worked on what content could/should be included on the site to capture search traffic and dedicated visitors around the 2018 Commonwealth Games. Rather than only working on assumptions, I was eager to user test with people in the building to gauge what they might expect and hope for in the way of content for a schedule of Games events, as well as a medal tally once the Games were underway. There have been some large research projects undertaken around audience and demographics of RNZ users and I tapped into these reports to narrow down deliverables for two key personas which had been identified.

In preparation for the testing I researched what RNZ and its competitors offered during coverage of the 2016 Olympic Games and then noted as many elements as I could imagine might sit in a schedule and a medal tally.

From there 12 different users were interviewed, each of them being asked to place the features into three groups: Must Have, Nice to Have, and Not Concerned. Each of the 12 sorted lists were photographed and I then collated the data and presented it in a spreadsheet enabling us to quickly see the commonly desired and expected features for all our users.

From this research I was able to distill my features into the most commonly shared “must haves” and “nice to haves”, and disregard the rest.

Paper Wireframes

I then developed paper wireframes to visualise how users could link to the data and where new Games content might sit on the site. Designs were undertaken from a mobile first perspective, as analytics showed that our news audience especially, predominantly use mobile to reach RNZ.

Next Steps

From there I refined wireframes in Sketch and the developers rapidly created the assets required for the web page.

A news organisation works fast and during this quick design phase there was uncertainty which information might be imported from third-parties, meaning a different set of design requirements than if all content was generated within RNZ. Regardless of the data sources used, the UX work was invaluable in setting a benchmark for user expectations on what should be included in RNZ’s offerings.

A great result from this piece of work was the benefits of the advocacy of UX within RNZ. User testing with colleagues across different teams gets them involved and able to see the benefits that UX brings to the organisation.

A good UX practitioner needs to have competencies in working with people, in leadership and communication. The ability to elicit information from users and many different stakeholders in varying scenarios is a large part of the work. To this end, verbal and nonverbal communication are constantly at work and an experienced UX researcher is able to put others at ease, allowing the best insights to emerge.