In 2007 Sports Illustrated approached the team at Action Engine and wanted to build a mobile application for their users. They wanted an app that keep their users engaged with their favorite teams on their mobile devices in real time. The goal of the project was to design an experience that would work well on almost all major smartphone devices at the time. We wanted to allow users to choose which 4 teams they wanted to stay connected with and allow them to see real-time updates while on their devices. The design would need to support multiple sport types which also included minor league and college teams. We would go on to support Windows Mobile, Java, RIM Blackberry and Symbian devices.
I was the mobile designer on the project and worked with the product team to build out the experience. I worked along side a UX research lead and the creative director to help define the user flows and experience. I provided everything from the initial conceptual designs to the loading animations across the experience.
We had to support customization of a mobile application which was a unique concept at the time. We also had a very large set of team assets that we needed to create and manage in the app and since phones were limited on space and speed, file size was always a factor in the design process. Another big challenge at the time was the sheer number of phones we supported was daunting. The lack of unity between phones was a big challenge and designing an experience that worked well on all phones and input types was a challenge.
