The Athletic

About The Athletic

From 2019 to 2021 I was the product Designer on Core Product team. Our goal was to help people to have great immersive experience on TA's content. Including work on user onboarding, sharing, front page design, podcast, and team/player page on ios, android, and the web.

I worked on a variety of different teams including Growth, Internal tools, Traffic, and Core Product. As the 3th designer I helped grow the team by 2x, and building out the design for the Hacckathons.

My Role

Wireframe

Duration

12 Weeks

Product

Visual Design

Contributers

John Sinsabaugh / Senior Product

Stu Ohler / Design Director

Tools

Figma

Adobe After Effect

Ryan Eskridge / Product Manager

Marc Mazzoni / Developer

James Lovejoy / Developer

Kyle Browning / Developer

TASK

In what ways might we strengthen The Athletic's product by continuing to refine the user experience with new strategies which will improve not only our paid users' experience but also our free users?

"Hmm...it sounds like a tough challenge, feels a bit broad to execute at this moment. Let's anatomize this task, and make it more clear what we can do here..."

Discovery

Found some interesting reviews on app store:

I enjoy several columnists on here but navigating otherwise is not great. I like a single overall front page with the top stories in all sports, regardless if I follow the sport or league. Still haven't found a place to see that.

I feel like too many of those good stories slip through the cracks and I miss them because of the way "my feed" doesn't really deliver. I follow a handful of specific writers but I rarely see their stories popping up at the top of my feed. I follow certain teams/leagues, but it doesn't seem to get the balance.

I d'like to catch up on different trending sports news during my commute, but there are a lot of articles in my feed, and lots of them I don't really care about.

"Free" 7 day trial yet you can only read one article. How can you judge a magazine type of app by its content when you don't really have "free" trial to check things out, and limited to one free article?

In the end, I ended up deleting the app (less than 30mins) as I was so frustrated that I can only read one article.

I'm not digging the oversized images taking up precious real estate on my phone screen. This is especially true in the "My Feed" section. I would like to see the content title and a small blurb of what the content is about. We have all seen countless photos of athletes in action or standing around so making it larger is kinda pointless.

Define Problems

1. Users having a bad time finding good stories on my feed

2. Hard for users to find their followed writers' articles on my feed

3. Background photo took too much space, instead of using a big BG photo, they would love to see something more related to the content.

4. Free users have limited experience before they convert to paid users.

5. User wants to get those trending news more quickly

More Thoughts

At that moment, all the postings on the feed page were set in chronological order, and it also means if you missed the time when the article was posted you'll have a hard time finding that article back. How can we let users could easily find out the great content they missed? (Having a sub-Navi within my feed page called "most popular"?)

We knew there were a lot of users using their morning coffee time and during the commute to read articles in The Athletic, can we help them to catch up with daily trending news more efficiently?

The current article display on the feed page is like this: BIG Photo + Headline

Pro:

1. BIG background photo could visually attract more users' attention.

2. Easy scalability for eng team

Cons:

1. Within one screen, it only fits 3 article modules maximum, it might take users a while to get what they really want.

2. Not enough valuable content showing for users.

3. Lack of customization

4. A bit challenging for writers to find great photo

Let's talk about free user's experience here: Every free user (without starting a free trial) tries to read the content of one article, and they will be blocked by a paywall immediately after finishing the first paragraph. Besides that, there's not much actions allow free user to do in the product, and if our long term goal is enhance the retention and conversion rate, maybe we can show free user some more real value content but not expose too much, or allow them to do more things to keep them stay in the app, it probably can solve the problems.

"It looks like there's a lot of problems, let's see what we can do better here..."

Ideation

We invited the editorial team to join the conversation to discuss what could we deliver here, after several conversations, we made a content type list: