Forza Football Reporter
The vision of Forza Football, the company behind the livescore app with the same name, is to make the world of football a better place and available for everyone. A world of football where men and women have equal opportunties and where the availability is not dependent on socioeconomic background nor sexuality. This is done by providing livescores and highlights for the biggest leagues and tournaments around the world, and by letting their 3 million monthly active users getting their voice heard through polls and surveys.
The idea behind the company’s latest product, Forza Football Reporter, is to take a big leap forward to cover all football matches around the world. Forza Football Reporter is a tool that makes it possible for essentially any team to share live updates of their matches to friends and family. It opens up the opportunity to follow your 17-year-old daughter’s team in the same app as the top European teams.
I had the honor to design the foundation of this web app’s UI and I also played a big part of it’s latest facelift and complete re-design this spring.
What: User research / UX / UI When: June 2018 - February 2020
The mission
The proffesional teams and players make up for less than 0.1% of all football connoisseurs around the world. In order to cover the 99.9% of teams and players that media will not, Forza Football hired me and three other students from Chalmers to design and develop a reporting tool, a reporting tool tailored to be used during matches to report events such as goals, cards and substitutions right after they happen. This would not only bring tremendous of value to the team and its fans, but also to the company of Forza Football since they are aiming to cover all the matches in the world.
Background & Research
The first step for me, as a designer, was to get a better understanding of the different stakeholders and competitors on the market. I had to benchmark and talk to potential users, as well as employees at Forza that could help me better understand the company’s heritage and what part this product would play in their ecosystem.
The next step was to find out all the necessary data points that would need a data entry in the reporting UI – the place where users would spend the majority of their time. As a MVP, the inputs were limited to four events: goal, injury, substitution and card namely. I also had to ideate on a sign-up flow where all new users would specify the players of their team, as well details such as the team's colors and logo.
Flows & Patterns
During the user research, we realized that coaches are drowned with stuff to do right before match start. We therefore structured our flows to nudge users to prepare as much as they possibly can before game day. And since a game can be quite hectic, it was crucial for us to enable instant feedback on all reported events, as well as the ability to change them once an error occurs.
The users will keep their eyes on the game majority of the time. Once they need to report an event using the tool, it needs to be fast and intuitive in order to enable users to quickly get back to watching the game. I hence created medium fidelity flows for each event to see if we could re-use components and patterns to establish consistancy throughout each user journey.
Final design
We chose a three tab layout for the web-app based on the desired flows. The first tab is all about adding those pre-game details such as line-ups and formations.
The second tab is the main view during the game where users will see the very familiar timeline of events, iconic for the Forza Football app. This is the place where the reporter will add events during the game.
Under the third tab, users will find all those extra stats. This place is for the experts who wants it all. It is possible to report possession, shots and free kicks, to name a few.
Implementation
The tool is shipped and can be found here. It is used actively by teams all over the world and was also the official, featured reporting tool for Gothia Cup 2019 - world’s biggest youth football tournament.
