Racing Post: Janus

The Racing Post’s B2C products – the website, the iOS and Android apps had been limping along on a very complex technical platform that was slowing down new feature development to a glacial pace, editorial content was creaking through an antiquated CMS, and the user experience had been design without many “users” involved. The overall effect was declining revenue as Racing Post couldn’t keep competitive, the editorial team getting increasingly frustrated by how limited their CMS was to handle new types of content, and new users bouncing at a high rate because they could not understand what was in front of them. Something had to given. The company finally bit the bullet and invested. On came Project Janus…  

THE SET UP

• My role: Director of Product Design and User Research
• Company: Spotlight Sports Group, Racing Post brand
• Main Team: B2C product designers, user researchers, B2C product management, delivery, development, 3 P&L owners, CPO, CTO, & the Editor in Chief

I was charged with overhauling the process of how discovery was tackled in the company, especially how the business interacted with design and research, trying to combine user feedback along with subject matter and discipline expertise when problem solving. 

A new, refreshed look

• Modernising the look and feel to be more engaging and competitive
• Bringing the UI inline with the new, lighter focused branding direction
• Injecting more energy through photos, graphics and wider colour usage
• Updating navigation patterns to emphasise dynamic content
• Prominently displaying and positioning Racing Post’s unique content

Design sprint workshops…

Where post-its went to die. We were dealing with massive features or journeys in every design sprint (definitely not ideal and led to a lot of burn out later on). We needed a lot of outside input and had to please a large number of stakeholders with low UX matrity. By doing structured, scheduled, transparent design sprints, we were able to do discovery at pace and keep everyone in-the-loop, as relevant.

As part of the sprint process, I worked with the research team  to get in front of research needed for upcoming sprints and advised how to keep stakeholders in the loop on user testing viewing sessions. Refining research’s process fundamentally changed how the business worked with the UXDR team, especially in regards to consulting us about user knowledge and insights.

BEYOND PRODUCT: WORKING WITH EDITORIAL

The news and editorial side of the business was finally, after many long years, upgrading their extremely restrictive CMS. Transforming how news content would work in the Janus products meant editorial content could get a long overdue visual refresh. Editorial also wanted, needed, demanded more flexibility and features for how content could be presented on the website and in the apps. This led to changes in content taxonomy and the design of many variations of content presentation including:

• Highlighting racing festivals and related events
• Live commentary feeds and social media integrations
• Sponsored editorial and affiliate partner promotion
• And all the states of each: bylines, date/time of publication, sharing, popularity, etc.

A massive project all in itself, crammed into the same timeline. It only worked due to the good working relationships built between product management, design, research and Editorial, and the trust built between the teams.

(Coming soon!) More Editorial design improvements:

KEY HIGHLIGHTS AND FEATURES

Helping users new to racing:

More descriptive labels and easy, more obvious ways to access to info and data definitions–helping a larger audience to understand our content and convert with us.

(Coming Soon!) Quick case studies about specific features and flows of this project:

THE ORGANISATIONAL IMPACT

Trust and understanding between the business, editorial and product were established: The UX maturity of the business and trust in qualitative research improved drasticaly throughout the new processes introducted in this project. Establishing Design Sprints involving all relevant the teams and stakeholders helped with raising the profile of designers to “business problem solvers” and with better sharing of subject matter expertise from different disciplines across the company to all teams involved.

Proper understanding of our users: Through our pre-project user research and validation user testing sessions throughout the project, our stakeholders and subject matter experts gained a more broad, yet nuanced view of who used our products, when, how and why. This helped to break down long held assumptions and biases that had stymied product innovation. 

Broader collaboration across departments within and outside of the product production track: The inclusiveness and transparency produced with the design sprint process lead to the design and research team to be first port of call for other departments looking for different or more creative way to solve their day-to-day issues, both in regards to deliverables and better processes.

Long overdue improvements to News and Editorial content handling: Some improvements launched right away and others funneled into a detailed future-state plan for design and implementation of new content templates. The upgrades gave more flexibity to the Editorial team to present more engaging content in written, photographic and video formats, as well as better cross navigation and integration of racing data and tipping.