2024 NCAA March Madness App @DISH TV
I designed a DISH TV app as a hub for 430K+ internet connected customer households to find, watch and record games of the 2024 March Madness tournament, and to keep up with tournament progress and scores.
Time: 3 weeks (Dec 2023)
Role: Product Designer
Platform: 10ft TV (DISH Hopper family of receivers)
Status: In production
Metrics: Viewership, time to content
Figma Prototype
The ask: A content hub
For the 2024 March Madness tournament, my team will be responsible for launching a central place to find, watch and record games and keep up with the tournament. This will provide a much easier content discovery experience than remembering channel numbers, scrolling through the EPG (Electronic Programming Guide) for schedules or searching online for scores and stats. It will also be a key way to engage a substantial portion of the subscriber base that are sport enthusiasts.
This will be the first time that a sports app on the Hopper receivers will leverage the new Home Native architecture. This will provide a few key benefits:
Faster load times, smoother transitions, and higher navigational efficiency
Create a modularized, reusable template for future seasonal events and campaigns
Launch and changes will be much faster than the regular software release process
Non-internet connected customers will have access to more features except scores and stats
Tailoring the design to college basketball
In order to tailor the app experience to the tournament, my PM and I decided to make slight modifications to regular DISH patterns. We plan to heavily leverage the Game Finder app, which was designed for finding and tracking stats and scores for multiple sports games.
WE WILL NOT…Use generic game thumbnails that only show team logos.
WE WILL NOT…Open the regular Infocard to show details of the game; it is difficult to scan or navigate and not suited for sports metadata.
WE WILL NOT…Run a bracket challenge like in past years due to cost, low engagement and usability challenges on 10ft.
WE WILL…Use Game Finder tiles that show team logos, colors and names, game progress and scores.
WE WILL…Open the Game Finder which shows relevant scores and stats
WE WILL…Display games in a bracket format so that viewers could easily keep up with tournament progression.
Low fidelity iterations
ITERATION #1I quickly mapped out the layout with Game Finder components. The following updates were made after feedback from design and engineering:
Spotlight (large thumbnails in the first shelf) was not yet supported.
‘Record all games’ and ‘Show scores’ were set-it-and-forget-it features that should not be buried at the bottom.
Where I decided to break the pattern
Pressing the <Options> remote key typically activates the Options menu in DISH experience. This pattern requires excessive attention shifts between the screen and the remote and unnecessary key presses for this app with only 2 options. Surfacing the Recording and Score Visibility options directly on the screen should give them more discoverability.
ITERATION #2High fidelity and prototypes
The first step was to rework game tiles into 4:3 ratios to fit the home screen template and add seed information.
In the upcoming game tiles, I moved the second team’s seed from the end to the front of the team name to prevent it from truncating off with longer team names.
Ongoing/Completed game
Recording flow
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Offline experience
Upcoming gameAs the most reusable and implementable solution, the existing apps shelf in the home screen was used to format links to bracket view, other viewing apps and the recording and scores buttons. Initially, I arranged them based on what I assumed to be their order of popularity. However, upon realizing that bracket view, college sports multiview, and Game Finder all direct to different views or apps, while the other two primarily function as settings, I decided to visually group and separate them for added clarity.
Given that recording all games in the tournament would be the sole recording option available, the tile only required toggling between two states. After exploring a few color and toggle options, I settled on just adopting the ‘recording’ badge from Game Finder and changing the tile text according to the recording status. I wanted to avoid drawing too much attention to the tile with intense colors and to prevent any potential confusion in this less-than-ideal use case for the toggle.
I am working with the marketing team to finalize artwork for the banner image, app icon, etc.
Bracket view
The bracket view will primarily reuse the layout and UI from previous bracket challenges, incorporating refinements on typography, spacing and color to reduce visual clutter and complexity and enhance overall legibility.
After prototyping and testing the full bracket view (left) where an overlay indicated the focus state on each region, I realized that navigation would be too confusing and clunky, especially moving from the ‘Championship’ section to the other regions. Since TV remotes only provide 4 basic directional navigation keys, navigating such a layout would be ambiguous. Therefore, I proposed a tab-based navigation scheme instead, mirroring the pattern in the official NCAA app. This will be much more intuitive to navigate between regions.
Offline experience
When the receiver is not connected to the internet, some features become unavailable. Thankfully, as Game Finder already supports most features offline, the experience will be mostly identical except not being able to show scores or stats.
Anticipated impact
Based on past years’ baselines, we expect ~250k unique receivers to visit the app across ~300k sessions. We will measure total viewership hours through the app as well as time to content, and compare the metrics with those non-users of the app.
In 2022, subscribers who submitted a bracket churned ~2.2 points less than those who did not open the bracket challenge app. We will plan to conduct an analysis on the impact on retention.
Stretch goals
Front load show/hide score setting
In Game Finder, scores are shown by default and usage for toggling it off is extremely low. The caveat is that this setting is hidden in the bottom most shelf. Those who wish to hide scores to avoid spoilers might feel way more strongly about it than others. It would create a more sensible experience if they could pick their preference upon launching the app for the first time to avoid seeing any possible scores at all. I plan to run this concept through an unmoderated user test to determine if we should add it as a nice-to-have feature.
Similar example on DirecTV Stream