New Web platform for the Swedish Football Association

The Swedish Football Association (SvFF), the country’s largest sports association had decided to streamline all their channels and to create a seamless user experience across their digital platforms for the fans and the professionals within Swedish football.

The Swedish Football Association (SvFF), the country’s largest sports association had decided to streamline all their channels and create a seamless user experience across its digital platforms for the fans and the professionals within Swedish football.

Background

Just in time for the World Cup, SvFF launched a new website with our assistance. With a commitment to making football more accessible, the newly redesigned, easy-to-navigate website debuted just before kick-off. During this first phase, the primary focus was on football fans and the general public. The subsequent phase targeted professionals within Swedish football.

Project & Goal

In Phase 2, our objective was to revamp www.Fogis.se, a subsection of SvFF utilized exclusively by those active within the football ecosystem, from professional players and coaches to football schools and elementary school sections. This effort was to be synchronised with SvFF’s other web platforms serving similar target groups.

The goal for Phase 2 was to address the needs of the association’s other key groups. The task involved redesigning Fogis.se to better cater to user needs and to synchronize it with multiple scattered web and mobile platforms that were previously operating in silos.

My work

• Conducting qualitative research
• Creating and facilitating workshops
• Performing user interviews
• Mapping user journeys
• Developing UX strategies
• Designing information architecture
• Wireframing and prototyping

Design Process

Discovery Phase

Understanding, researching, and involving key stakeholders.

Workshop

To optimize time, I facilitated a large workshop with individuals from various parts of the Football Association, discussing the project’s measurable goals and target groups.

1 . Why are we doing this?

What measurable effects or measurable changes do we want to achieve in this project? In this exercise, people from different sections of the Associations shared their insights.

Findings

We grouped the many post-its containing the measurable goals shared by the team. The top three were as the following:

User-friendliness

It should be easier for the user to find and quickly apply for information. We achieve it through more clarity in structure and navigation.

Impacts

• Facilitate for the user to find the right information
• The visitor is going to find it searching for

Relevance

The information must be relevant and better reach out to each target group through better packaging.

Impacts

• The content should be better packaged and categorized for each target group
• Better SEO custom content
• Better updated and editor-reviewed content

Engagement

We want to get more active in Swedish football and associations. We do this through better conversion, as well as adding more inspiring and living content that improves customer experience.

Impacts

• Get more active in Swedish football and association life
• Get more people who sign up for courses and take note of knowledge materials
• Improved customer experience in the form of inspiring and living content

2 . Who are the target groups?

The participants discussed this through in 2 groups and each group created a list. They were overlapping to a large extent but they finally could vote for the most relevant ones.

Identified Target Groups

1. Unions/Clubs
2. Coaches
3. Players
4. Parents/Child players
5. Referees

End of Workshop

We said goodbye to the team & continued to the next step where we had to interview candidates from the above mentioned user-groups

3 . What do these groups have for needs?

 User Research . Qualitative Method

I conducted a qualitative study through user interviews, aiming to gather insights into how different groups use Fogis.se and their experiences, identifying what works well and potential areas for improvement.

The line of questioning I created was semi-structured and mostly open-ended allowing both us & the user to maneuver more freely by asking follow-up questions by us and the user revealing an insight that was relevant yet overlooked by us.

Analysing User Data

This included behavior analysis, emotional response (pain points), and identification of needs and drivers based on user feedback.

Notable Findings

• Users identify more strongly with their specific group than with any category.
• Most people access Fogis.se when searching for specific information.
• More people would visit Fogis.se frequently, not only when they need specific information, if the content were more relevant and engaging.
• Information is dispersed across various platforms/systems; there is no reliable, updated, and searchable centralized information bank.
• The main menu is the primary tool most people use to find information.
• Attractive CTA (Call to Action) buttons and modules are needed.
• The homepage space is not fully utilized.
  There is a need for easier interaction opportunities.

Devised Solutions

Multisite

As previously mentioned, one of our 2 objectives were to synchronise the scattered information across different platforms. This way we can consolidate different sections under one umbrella which is easy to find and navigate.

Cross Platform Search Function

The user should easily search for categorized content from all SvFF’s platforms.

Favouring Roles over Categories

We were initially uncertain about the information architecture, particularly whether users would search for specific items directly or navigate through relevant subsections. For instance, a referee might first look for courses in general and then specifically for Judging courses.

However, our observations revealed that users primarily identify with their roles and prefer to access dedicated pages for their specific roles before diving into content. For example, referees prefer to directly access a section for referee-related courses rather than navigating through a generic course section to find what is relevant to them. First, they go to the Referee pages, and then they explore the courses.

Conversion through Engagements

Using attractive and interactive CTAs & modules.