Adding rich statistical data on top of a sports video experience.
One of ViewLift's specialties is working really well in the Sports-vertical. Some Sports clients include Major League Lacrosse, the Professional Fighters League, Monumental Sports & Entertainment (which includes the professional teams The Washington Wizards and The Washington Capitals), and even smaller sport clients like The American Cornhole Organization.
All of these experiences are video-centric, but that's not everything. Sports fans and these clients' users love to understand the data and the statistics behind their favorite sports. My job was to bring video and numbers together in a meaningful way, but also in an abstract enough method so that these stat modules could work for multiple clients and more importantly, multiple sports. We have more than five sports represented by our clients—each with different rules and stats that are relevant.
Since this project was done one feature at a time, I had to treat each feature or module as its own self-contained piece.
For example, when integrating with different statistics providers, I began with seeing what data points were available by that provider and how they relate to each other. Then I would look to how the various major leagues, minor leagues, and college leagues present their data.
Stats can be boring or they can be exciting. It's important not to overwhelm the user with an avalanche of stats. Sports have no shortage of numbers, and delivering what's important and relevant to a user is a huge win.
This project was much more of a team effort than my work on the ViewLift Entertainment Template. Sports work was started by my coworker, and after I joined the project, we would each tackle pieces of it one at a time.
Later in the evolution of the project, I was the only designer on my team, so I would do 100% of the new features. Some of these include adding more robust statistics and betting odds.
It was really fun to work with data visualizations and statistics because so much of my previous work at ViewLift was Film and Show centered.
