Personalization on Roku Sports

Sports fans can select their favorite teams and see all live and upcoming games, highlights, replays, and on-demand content related to those teams — all in one place on Roku Sports.

Role: Design strategist responsible for the design lifecycle from discovery to launch.

Duration: Jan to Sep 2023

Sports Phase 1 launched in September 2022.

We continued to drive adoption through these building blocks.

The ultimate vision was to create a completely personalized sports experience for each Roku sports fan, starting with team favoriting.

Background and context

Design strategist

  • Responsible for the design, evaluation of research results, presentation to stakeholders, visuals, prototype testing, UI specs, and UXQA.

  • Partnered with Product to drive the direction of the Feature Guide.

  • Collaborated with Product and Engineering to plan, prioritize, and scope the feature.

My role

We used ML to implicitly identify favorite teams:

  • Live events

  • Seasonality

  • Recency

  • Click history

However, implicit favoriting had limitations on accuracy.

The problem

Use explicit team favoriting so users can see all their team events in one place.

Use favorited teams as an additional signal for notifications and shoulder content like highlights, replays, and on-demand shows.

The opportunity

Survey of Roku sports fans (May 2023)

59% want Explicit favoriting. Users preferred to pick their sports, leagues, or team preferences; or allow preference selections in Settings.

9% are comfortable with implicit recommendations based on their watch history.

Key research findings 

Of the 70 millions Roku subs, 74% watch sports. We targeted avid and casual fans.

Casual Fans

Fill in the gap sports, shorter streaming hours, lower investment in sports

Avid Fans

Constantly watch everything related to sports, long streaming hours, highly invested in sports. Consumers of sports-related content, including live games, highlights, and commentary shows

Target audience

I looked at other D2C TV apps and how they’re handling team favoriting: DirecTV, NFL App, NBA App, and ESPN and found common patterns that I proposed for our feature:

  • Wizard flow

  • Discoverable entry point

  • A central management destination to add more favorites or remove your teams

  • A dedicated team or league page after favoriting

Comparative research

Proposed solutions

Mobile This was the cheapest and quickest way to get a MVP out the door. However, we decided that we needed metrics on the TV OS so this was punted to Phase 2.

Onboarding Adding the ability to favorite teams during the setup and activation process would have a significant impact because sports fans would be initiated to the Sports Zone upon setup. Infiltrating the setup module required too many changes in the backend, however.

A wizard flow This would be the most robust solution that would enable users to manage team selections and a discoverable entry point. We punted this to Phase 2 due to cost and resources.

Narrowing scope

After running through numerous proposals based on user research, I worked with Product and Engineering to narrow down the scope of how to build a MVP for Phase 1 that could fulfill user needs in a short time frame.

I then mapped out a long-term roadmap for Team Favoriting.

Based on the new scope, I based my design goals on these flows:

  • Enable favoriting only when a user navigates into a Game details page

  • Enable favoriting and removing from favorites only when the games are in season

Design goals

Discoverability

Favoriting entry points must be discoverable to sports fans

Clarity on outcome

The payoff must be transparent to the user

I focused on these 4 main questions:

  • Is the feature discoverable

  • Were users ok going back to the Details page to remove a favorited team

  • Did users understand the “+” icon and did they need the text labels

  • Did users understand where they’d see their team events

Usability testing

Testers were okay with the point of discovery being on the Game Details page and not on the home screen.

  • However, some said it would be nice to know that they could do this without having to drill into a Details page.

  • Most users found favoriting/unfavoriting a team from the game details screen “easy” and “convenient” and had no issue with favoriting a team from the game details screen only.

  • A few power users mentioned that they expected to be able to use the “star” button on the remote to invoke the action.

  • Users expected to see all the upcoming games in chronological order.

Test results

Only half of the users understood that “+” meant “add to favorites.” Two testers suggested familiarity with a heart icon.

Based on the results, my updates reflected a more seamless transition from one button state to the next (default > on hover > selected).

Testing the icon + button label

The crux of my usability test would be to test my hypothesis on discoverability and clarity of outcome.

To aid in discoverability, I added an Info overlay the first time the user lands on Sports.

I decided to show this overlay no more than once a day for a max of 3 times and to suppress it if the user has already favorited a team.

Design systems

I identified already existing design patterns I could leverage and also contributed new patterns to the system, like this overlay with the favoriting icon.

Final designs

Button icons and labels:

  • I swapped in the heart icon based on the usability testing

  • I carried the varying changes of the icon through each action state: default, on hover, and on click.

  • I added the city + team name in cases where it could be San Francisco Giants or New York Giants.

Confirmation overlay

Finally, I added information in the last confirmation screen to let users know where they could see their favorited teams.

Star button on the remote control

This hidden feature was added after usability to accommodate our power users who knew of this existing pattern. This saved them the hassle of having to drill into the game details screen.

Launch scheduled for Nov 2023

  • Expected projections: increase in streaming hours (including those for shoulder content)

  • Phases 2 and 3 projected to increase awareness of Sports Zone

  • Metrics:

    • number of teams favorited per unique visit

    • If streaming hours correlate to those favorited teams

    • favoriting methods (star button on remote or Game Details page)

Outcome