Alice WinterGet in touch
Concept & UX Design · 2023-24 • 4 min read

Snowsports in real time, all the time

Live results and other stats for people standing on a mountain, wearing gloves, in the snow.

Client
International Ski Federation (FIS)
Role
Concept & UX Design
Duration
June 2023 - January 2024
Outcome
New native app released on iOS and Android
Access
Open
Five phones fanned out on a dark green background with a blue sphere behind them, each showing a screen of the new FIS app. The centre phone shows the Home feed, with a live event and the World Cup leaders below it. Around it: an athlete profile for Mikaela Shiffrin, an onboarding screen, a video feed, and a results table.
FIS NEW APP IN JANUARY 2024 — unlocking a new way to experience competitive snow sports.

01 — Context

The International Ski Federation (FIS) asked us to redesign their app from scratch, to:

  • get out of their previous vendor lock-in
  • modernise the UI
  • improve the functionality
How might we leverage the new app to improve the end-to-end FIS user experience and their retention?

02 — Discover

What I did

  • Review existing research from the client
  • Benchmark
  • Design kick off workshop

Concept kickoff

I organised and facilitated a workshop with the client’s stakeholders, some of our engineers and my design pair.
We covered goals, target audience and priorities within the agreed scope, knowing both could change later.

The outcome of the stakeholder workshop. Three panels across the top. KPIs: increase MAU, satisfaction and engagement, higher retention, push notification subscriptions, positive PR, a happy FIS stakeholder and successful commercial integration with sponsors, with a next step for Reaktor to run a workshop on measuring success. Target audience: the streamers (28%, mostly in North America, who want to watch competitions live or as re-runs) and the casual followers (17%, who follow athletes more than the sport), with similar needs at different levels of engagement and the aim to convert casuals into streamers. The vision statement: “Your digital companion for snow sports events and athletes, providing the latest insightful and surprising content, digital experiences, results and schedules in a personalised, contextualised and seamless way.” Below, content and priorities: the product soul (follow live event results, find upcoming events, learn about an athlete, follow an athlete), then nineteen milestones in priority order, from engaging content and latest videos down to finding info about FIS. A next steps column gives user journeys, navigation and IA, and behind-the-curtain solutions to Reaktor, and data on the current app to FIS.
OUTCOME OF THE STAKEHOLDER WORKSHOP — what to do, for whom, and why

Business insights

  • The new audience is younger, follows snow sports more casually and across several disciplines, and wants more media content
  • The existing audience still needs the old features, plus data and stats in real time
  • Two separate apps are not an option

Technical insights

  • Data comes from one backend and media from another (a CMS), and both also feed the new website

03 — Explore

What I did

  • Sketch, sketch, sketch
  • Information architecture
  • Concept testing with snow sports fans

Information architecture

Fans should be able to follow more than one discipline without constantly switching back and forth.
That needed a dynamic structure, with all content filtered by the fan’s preferences. I came up with the “interconnected” concept, where each type of content can be reached by more than one route.

The interconnected information architecture, with the principle “Whatever path the fan can imagine taking to access content and knowledge, that path is available.” Three columns. Entry points, the differently filtered landing pages the fan starts from: Home, Find, Live and Watch. Content, split into data (calendar and schedule, results, live ticker, standings) and media (short format such as stories, long format such as articles and replays, livestream). Micro landing pages, where the fan can follow a specific athlete or calendar event, with Disciplines marked in pink as an open question. Below, the personalisation functions: onboarding and preferences, notifications and favourites. A footnote says this is a simplified picture, not a full map of the app.
INTERCONNECTED INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE — an app where you can navigate vertically and horizontally

With my design pair, I wireframed the main parts of the app to work out the user flows and navigation.

A wall of greyscale wireframes on a whiteboard canvas, covered in sticky notes. Down the left, under Find: calendar, athletes finder and standings, with a couple of hand-drawn standings sketches. Lines lead from each finder into a row of detail screens: the event page (schedule, overview, athletes and live results), labelled “Learn about an event”, and the athlete page (overview, results, standings, cup standings, highlights, news and social), labelled “Learn about an athlete”, with bar and pie charts of an athlete’s stats and a notification settings screen. A red line marks the fold across the athlete screens.
WIREFRAMES — early sketches of the app’s main sections

Backend structure

The app had to work with two backends, one of them brand new, and both also fed a new website being built in parallel. I supported the website’s designer when needed, to keep the whole system coherent. I mapped the types, categories and other parameters of the media content so that all four parts would fit together. That’s how I found out we needed a matrix architecture, not a tree.

The media parameters, with pink marking what was still open. Four columns. Content items: article, image, video and in-app story from Storyblok, and calendar event, athlete page and standing from the FIS database, with the question “How do we deal with those?”. Categories: highlight, livestream, recap, interview. Levels: Olympic Winter Games, World Cup, World Ski Championships, Europa Cup, Nor-Am Cup and more. Disciplines: cross-country, jump, combined, alpine, freeski and more. Two open questions underneath. On structure: naming conventions, a hierarchy or levels, sub-categories as subjects and categories as disciplines, and “Matrix, not tree: is that a possible way to do it?”. On metadata: what metadata do we need?
MAPPING THE MEDIA PARAMETERS — making sense of how the backends could work

04 — Deliver

What I did

  • Development planning
  • Handoff high-fidelity design
  • Developer support

Refining the details

We then turned the wireframes into detailed designs. I focused on interactions and UX, my design pair on visuals and art direction.
The existing brand book was our guide, but we had complete freedom to modernise the brand identity (except the logo).
The result: ready-to-develop mockups for the team.

“Alice’s combination of self-confidence, fearless attitude, attention to detail, willingness and ability to test services and collect user feedback make her a truly valuable and professional team player. She has abilities and character that quite often lead and belong to positions that define how products and services are built.”

My design pair - Reaktor
High-fidelity screens of the FIS app, tilted in a grid on the project blue: the schedule for an Audi FIS World Cup, day by day; a results table with flags and times; an onboarding screen; Explore, listing alpine World Cup events in Val d’Isère; the home feed with a live event and the World Cup leaders; Mikaela Shiffrin’s athlete profile with her latest results and achievements; and a latest videos feed.
FINAL LAYOUTS READY FOR DEVELOPMENT — and implemented in the new app

05 — Results

Fans and athletes feedback

We tested the concept with a prototype, then with a TestFlight app. Feedback was very positive, and it also showed us what needed changing.

In their words

In their words

It would be awesome to watch official FIS livestreams in the app.
Cross-country skiing fan · Interview, 2023

In their words

It’s nice to filter out other disciplines and concentrate on a certain one. A personalized feed sounds like a really nice feature.
Former alpine skiing athlete · Interview, 2023

In their words

Before the start list is available, the details give me nothing. Seeing that there will be a start list would be more fulfilling.
Snowboard fan and former coach · Interview, 2023

In their words

When onsite for lower level comps I want the live results!!
Cross-country skiing fan · Interview, 2023

Our stakeholders also passed on very positive feedback from athletes at competitions.

It’s really cool and big step forward and your design mock up’s in the first place played a big role that we came together to deliver this new app in the first place!

Marketing Manager · FIS

The project has since moved to another team, but last time I checked, it still carried the vision we designed! Check it out on Android or iOS.

For more detail, read Reaktor’s case study about the project.

06 — Learnings

People matter

I already knew it, but this project showed it especially clearly. It wasn’t the hardest in substance, but it had its challenges. A whole team supporting me, and me supporting them, is what I value most from it.

Work-wise I’ve really enjoyed her design-work! I feel like Alice was one of the key factors that made the project enjoyable.

Fullstack Developer · Reaktor

One reason I joined Reaktor in the first place was to have that kind of collaboration with the designers.

Mobile Developer • Reaktor

Thank you Alice for all your work, help and laughs!

Delivery Lead · Reaktor

Choosing my battles

Starting a project from scratch and finding out there’s no project manager isn’t easy. We improvised: one of us took on the role, and the rest of us supported them. At times I took on too much, ran out of bandwidth for design work, and burnt out a little.

07 — Team

Core team

Alice • Concept and app UX Designer | App UX and UI Designer | Website UX and UI Designer | 2 Mobile Developers | 3 to 5 Full stack Developers | Delivery Lead

Accountable

Director of Digital and Innovation at FIS | Account Manager at Reaktor

Contributors

The IT team at FIS

Consulted

Marketing Manager at FIS | Snow sports fans | Former athletes

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