2020
Design exercise
Situation
As an avid baseball fan, I frequent the MLB At Bat app often during the regular season and beyond. One evening, while checking the latest Hot Stove news for the off-season, I was thinking as great as this experience is for a baseball fan, it is clearly in need of a face lift.
Action
Taking cues from ESPN and Apple, and focusing on modern app design and white space standards, I took to executing on a few new revised layouts.
I wanted to focus primarily on the aspect of this as a news app. Finding ways to expose content thoughtfully to the user (opening up the white space thoughtfully to soften the experience and focus on the content and its treatment). Additionally, finding new ways to promote timely information in a similar way to Instagram/Facebook stories. It would certainly be an interesting pattern to test. That being said, this pattern would lend itself effectively to the wealth of content that is shared and recorded during the baseball season (i.e. batting practice, interviews).
Updates to the nav bar include merging TV (video) and audio into one standalone item. The search by voice (microphone icon) was switched to a more universally recognized symbol for searching (magnify glass). The goal is to increase awareness for these items, and at the same time pair down the cognitive load for a user.
Cosmetic updates of content was the primary focus on the news page. The goal was to elevate the experience as a place for digesting content. After all, this is primarily a hub for news and information. In addition, the push for more timely content and the quest to retain loyalty to a younger market, the addition of a Team Stories feed (similar to video stories on Instagram and Faceboook) was added.
The full article view is based on Apple’s App Store pages that display content modally in a fully immersive, full-screen view. This enhanced view allows users to experience MLB’s content, images, and video in a whole new way that puts the focus on bringing breathtaking imagery and captivating content to the user’s app experience.
Taking cues from other sports apps and overall making refinements to visual and spacial hierarchy, the updated layout creates better separation and ease in parsing one game from the other. Whereas the current app design can be hard to discern one game from the other depending on where your eyes land on different sections of the page.