In 2014, while at Black Pixel, I worked with the Baltimore Ravens to create an iPad experience that went beyond the team stats and rosters available with any templatized experience. The Baltimore Ravens envisioned something more unique and engaging for their fan base.
During the kickoff meeting, we discussed ideas on how to accomplish our client’s vision, and included them into our thought process. By the conclusion of the kickoff meeting, we learned the client had some important requirements.
Needed to have the same user experience on the iPad in both view orientations.
Needed to have an engaging game-day experience, allowing fans to follow along from the comfort of their couch.
Needed to put news first. Putting news first allowed fans to access what was most important to them quickly and easily.
In the early stages of the design process, we explored magazine experiences and blog platforms for inspiration. We decided on a simple app architecture with a tab-less navigation approach, which allows the user to explore via simple swipes to access different levels of information.
We focused on finding the right fit for news and media content that felt good together, but not sacrificing the scores the fans want.
We did some early stage motion protoyping to explore ways the user might navigate through a section of the app. This specific interaction was scrapped in lieu of a new layout that offered a different navigation interaction.
A tight delivery deadline and a design challenge of creating a visual and interactive experience that adapted to both display orientations made this project challenging. We had to make sure the designs could flex and adapt to both orientations and with some initial lo-fidelity prototypes we were able to work through some of our issues early in the design process.
