The Client
The National Hockey League is the main professional ice hockey league in North America, and arguably the world, and is the 5th highest-rgrossing sport league globally.
It’s 32 member teams play in a regular season of round-robin leagues, with the 16 most successful going through to a post-season knockout cup.
The brief
The NHL contracted Deltatre’s Forge Multiply product as its new hosting and content management platform.
Forge Multiply allows an organisation to manage its own federation site and all of its member clubs’ ones in the same CMS. Team sites can be individually branded and managed so that each can maintain its own identity and community presence, while also consuming syndicated content from the main league.
The project was a complete redesign of all of the NHL’s digital properties. Delatatre were the prime design contractor and we were responsible for the responsive website, while a separate company, Maple Leaf Sports Entertainment (MLSE), would create a new native mobile app using the design system we created.
NHL has its own small in-house design team who weren’t resourced to handle such a large project, but would take over the management of the design once the site was live.
My Role
As lead designer on the Deltatre team, I was responsible for the UX design of the new site - particularly the site architecture and key user journeys - and also for managing the UI design team.
There were complex communication challenges as I’m based in London, while the NHL is based in New York, MLSE is in Canada and the UI designers were in Deltatre’s main office in Turin.
Discovery - Stakeholder interviews
Stakeholder interviews are a standard feature of my discovery process. I use them for several things:
To introduce myself. On a basic level, it’s good to get to know the people I’ll be working with
To understand the business dynamic. Individual interviews help uncover the expectations and needs of each separate department without the personal interplays and deference to seniority that can happen in group meetings
To flesh out the scope. I’ve often found that when we’ve responded to a Request for Proposal (RFP) the document issued by the client is written by a small number of people and can be skewed towards their views and needs. Other people are consulted but may not have had a say beyond that, and so meeting them can help uncover ideas and expectations that may not have made it through to the bid documentation
In the case of NHL, that last item was especially important. There were some seemingly unimportant requirements around commercial partnerships that were mentioned in the RFP, but the details I found had a major impact on parts of the design.
