DISH 2024 Paris Olympics App

Context:

The 2024 Paris Olympics will drive massive TV viewership, making seamless access essential. A one-stop app within the Dish ecosystem will provide event information and effortless viewing, eliminating the need to switch platforms. This streamlined experience will maximize engagement and enhance user satisfaction.

Challenge:

Branding- Align with NBC branding guidelines and copyright laws.
Complex Information Display – Balancing real-time data (medal counts, schedules, rankings) with a clean, readable layout on a large screen without overwhelming users.
Navigation & Usability – Designing an intuitive remote control-friendly interface with minimal clicks, ensuring smooth browsing for diverse users, including those unfamiliar with smart TV navigation.
Live & On-Demand Integration – Seamlessly integrating live streams, replays, and medal event markers while ensuring easy switching between events without disrupting the viewing experience.

Solution:

To enhance the 2024 Paris Olympics viewing experience, we will develop a dedicated TV app that centralizes all key Olympic content. The app will feature a real-time medal count, country rankings, and a comprehensive event schedule to keep users informed. Live event streams will be seamlessly integrated, allowing viewers to watch competitions in progress, while a medal event marker will highlight crucial moments when medals are being awarded.

Results:

31% increase in app usage compared to the previous Olympics.
App users watched 2.5x more Olympic content than non-app users.
23.6% increase in watch hours per user.

Scope: Product Designer

Duration: Four months

Tools: Figma

Role: Concept, Research, Wireframe, Hi-Fi Designs, QA, Prototype

User Research

I conducted multiple user studies, including surveys and click tests, to gather insights on user preferences and behaviors. These studies provided substantial support for our final designs by identifying key features and navigation patterns that would be most useful within the Olympics app.

The findings ensured our design decisions were data-driven, optimizing the user experience for seamless engagement.

An example task used for the click test was:

User Scenario: The user is in the Olympics app viewing the schedule page. They want to view a specific sports events instead of all of them at once.

Task: Click where you would be able to change the sports that are being shown on the page.

As users moved through each scenario, they would complete each task to the best of their ability, and then give feedback if there was confusion or difficulty.

The click tests allowed us to see physical evidence of understanding rather then having users explain if it was simple for them or not.

Design Process

Discovery

My product manager and I collected earlier data from previous Olympic app experiences to influence the design direction at the beginning of our discovery process.

Wireframing

The wireframes provided a clear blueprint of the interface, ensuring logical content placement.

Design Iterations

Each iteration led to a more usable, smooth experience which helped to create the final product. These are multiple versions of the schedule page.

Final Iteration

Hi-Fi Screen Flow

This is the final iteration of the hi-fidelity prototype. This is the home screen users would see when they first accessed the app. They would be able to view a medal count page, event schedule page, multi-view screen, and On Demand content. There are also shelves that include recent events, upcoming, personalized DVR content, networks with live viewing, top sports events shortcut, on demand daily highlights, and a Spanish content shelf for our Dish Latino users.

Takeaways

Throughout this project, I learned to:

Keep external visual assets organized, and always keep consistent with client's guidelines.
Always plan ahead for side use-cases. Needed to make sure users with no internet had a version and there was a pre-Olympics app view before events began.

I would change or improve:

There were some ideas I didn't get to include due to engineering or metadata constraints. I would have liked to have worked more closely with NBC to discuss future capabilities such as having more specific event information available.

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