Univision: Sports streaming service

Context

Univision’s networks mainly serve Hispanic and Latino audiences in the US and Mexico. The new service would carry mostly football, live and on demand, from the main leagues of the Americas and Europe, and run on AXIS, Massive’s VOD platform for broadcasters. Its working name, Socco, predates my start.

The scope covered responsive web for desktop, tablet and phone, native apps for iPhone, iPad and Android phones and tablets, and a Chromecast receiver, built only from out-of-the-box AXIS modules. I worked closely with the client team in the US to deliver as much of the expected experience as AXIS allowed, and to agree alternatives where it fell short of their business requirements.

Mapping leagues to confederations

My part was the UX, from April to June 2018. I drew the wireframes in Sketch and specified them in Axure, with references throughout to the AXIS demo and to AXIS’s own wireframes. Designs were reviewed at Massive and with Univision’s business stakeholders.

The league taxonomy follows the confederations: UEFA for Europe, CONCACAF for North and Central America and CONMEBOL for South America. In P1 a region home page sits above its league pages. P2 adds a country page between them and more leagues under each country, among them second divisions and Brazil’s state championships. The Leagues menu lists regions first, then countries A to Z, then regional tournaments.

I also mapped what the service would carry at each stage of the season, from launch through mid-season to the Christmas and New Year break, when a two-week VOD cut-off left three competitions to watch.

01Browse

Specifying the browse pages

Home, Schedule, Leagues, Region and League pages come in all seven layouts. I labelled each block on the wireframe with the AXIS component it uses: Hero 3:1, T1 and T2 tile rows, S1 category rows, ED2 and ED4 editorial blocks, the 4.0 list.

On desktop, an annotation column beside each page holds its rules and references. Among them, the navigation bar hides on scroll down and returns on scroll up, and the 3:1 hero takes playable content from any category.

On phones and tablets the web carries the same content as desktop in T2 rows, but playing video needs the native app.

Every tile follows one set of states, which I specified in the IA pages.

Keeping to out-of-the-box modules

02Playback

Skinning NeuLion’s player

NeuLion was to supply the player, and I specified the controls for each type of content, on iOS as a skin of NeuLion’s own. Live games get a 30-second skip back and a Back to Live button, active whenever the viewer is behind live. VOD games and clips add a 30-second skip forward and the full length of the event, and channels, whose streams carry little metadata, get play and pause only.

Specifying the Chromecast flows

For casting from the apps, I specified the sender flow on Android and on iOS in ten steps each, from the introduction to the extended player, against Google’s Cast design checklist and the AXIS Chromecast spec. Each step is paired with the screen the TV shows at that moment. Lock screen controls are Android only. The receiver was out-of-the-box AXIS, specified in seven states from loading to playing. Both flows click through as a prototype in Axure.

03Handover

Signed-out states and sign-up

Signed out, the web opens on a landing page and the apps on an onboarding page, and the detail pages for live, coming-up and VOD games have signed-out versions. Sign-up on the web runs from choosing a plan to creating the account, payment and confirmation.

In the apps, My Account redirects to the account on the web. On iOS that redirect was pending a review between Univision and Apple before implementation, to avoid an App Store rejection.

What was deferred, and what was handed over

Search, country pages, relative kick-off days and device management were held for P2, and the rest needed more than out-of-the-box AXIS or iOS allowed.

Outcome

The service was never released. After the UI was delivered, the project folded over commercial agreements between Univision and US TV and cable providers.