Canadian Olympic Committee

Elevating the national athlete support program for life after sport

Overview

In 2018, Deloitte Digital was engaged to conduct an experience and functionality audit on the current mygameplan.ca website – the portal for helping Canadian athletes to re-immerse themselves into society during life after sport. In addition, our project team was tasked with understanding the needs of Canadian athletes, GamePlan advisors and administrative users on the platform to identify areas of improvement, build net new functionalities on the website and reimagine it as a PWA or progressive Web App.

The Business Challenge

Game Plan is a national athlete wellness program supporting the skill and network development of retired and soon to be retired Canadian Olympic athletes. Additionally, the program provides them support with one-on-one guidance from expert Advisors for personalized strategies for success in areas of health, education, and career opportunities both on and off the field. The Canadian Olympic Committee (COC) had come to a point of acknowledgement that they were experiencing major gaps in the experience being offered to the program's users offline versus online through their digital platform mygameplan.ca. Hence, Deloitte being its Presenting Partner was requested to engage in a design audit, discovery, design and build phases to manifest the platform's revamp.

My Role & Responsibilities

I was a sole UX researcher and design lead on this project strategising the revamp of mygameplan.ca. Supporting me was an intermediate UI Designer, a functional project manager and a functional program lead for translating daily stakeholder inputs and functional user stories.

How might we improve the digital experience on MyGamePlan so that athletes find value in the program and ultimately, contribute to helping them live better and more holistic lives.

The Discovery Phase

The business challenges were not immediately easy to translate into a neat set of design goals right off the bat. Therefore, I set the project's discovery phase in motion by focusing my efforts understanding the current state of My Gameplan website and unlocking actionable insights based off two main sets of research activities:

Web Assessment

User Research

Validate discoverability / navigation of key resources for athletes and advisors on mygameplan.ca like program enrolment, articles, networking events and job avenues
Gauge athlete’s understanding of educational resources, program registrations, advisor outreach, game plan strategy and network support
Capture advisor's expectations of athletes and understanding their role in athlete’s game plan strategy

Establish a benchmark in the competitive landscape by evaluating the overall experience of best-in-class sites as well as the My Game Plan site against a sub-set of pre-defined UX heuristics
Get inspired by analyzing which elements from competitive sites contribute to a good user experience
Understand the current state of My Game Plan from a usability and design standpoint, and identify areas of improvement
Gather and analyze findings that will help inform design recommendations on how to improve the overall user experience of the enhanced My Game Plan site

Old Designs

The Research Strategy

Heuristic Review

We evaluated mygameplan.ca 's existing user experience against UX heuristic principles to test for site usability, identify problem areas and establish UX design principles for future builds. The analysis was done in collaboration with the COC team. For the purposes of this audit, four of the highest value heuristics with the greatest potential impact on the enhanced My Game Plan site were selected for a more focused and in-depth analysis.

KPI dashboard as guiding business principles

The committee's digital objectives with its KPIs identified to date served as the guiding business principles of what My Game Plan hoped to accomplish. We aligned on three main digital objectives as our guiding principles:

Increase registrations to My Game Plan
Engage visitors with valuable and rich content
Create utility through a memorable and useful experience to encourage returning visits

Illustrated here is a detailed view of these KPIs and how we planned to test the enhanced experience against them in the future.

Best-in-class comparable sites

We selected three comparable sites for studying best practices around ahlete care because they embody the essence of My Game Plan - helping athletes transition from one state to another:

TalentEgg for students transitioning to full time employees
NFL Player Engagement program for football players to find employment post-career
Olympic Athletes’ Hub for the global brand relevance and to help athletes live more holistic lives.

In depth User Interviews

We captured 15+ voices including retired and active Olympic athletes and their advisors through high level 1-on-1 qualitative interviews and card sorting exercises. Interviews explored underlying attitudes, expectations, needs and frustrations that helped us move the needle forward in terms of feature prioritisation and became the rationale for our future design decisions.

Design Implementation

UX & Functional Workshops

Based on the user interviews, competitive analysis, heuristic evaluation and the guiding principles established in the research phase, we conducted a series of prioritization exercises to develop a feature roadmap for the site users - athletes, advisors and the administrative teams. With features ranging from table stakes to innovative enhancements, we leveraged COC stakeholder inputs to develop a story map and identify build features and MVP/release timelines. Additionally, functional elaboration workshops helped us understand current state UX/functional behaviour and author comprehensive user stories.

Information architecture, wireframes and prototypes

We designed an IA for mygameplan.ca based on customer research analysis and ideation workshops. Additionally, we used wireframes and prototypes throughout the project to illustrate prioritised functionalities, design concepts, user interactions and user flows. These wireframes helped inform our functional stories and UI design. As the sole UX designer on the team, I collaborated closed with the UI designer and front end developers to build out an atomic library of design components to increase efficiency of high-fidelity wireframe creation, improve reusability and standardization.

UI Designs

Ultimately, we translated the UX deliverables into high-fidelity, production ready designs based on brand guidelines and modern interaction design principles

an abstract photo of a curved building with a blue sky in the background

Wrapping up

Even though the project timelines could not accommodate formal rounds of prerelease usability tests for MVP rollout, we created and tested prototypes of the key functionalities with some athletes and advisors we had formerly interviewed on a voluntary basis. We used their feedback to validate the newly proposed re-design and user flows. The insights found in relation to information architecture and user experience helped us create a backlog of defects and enhancements that were slated to be addressed in the next release.