The Best Ref
The Best Ref is a responsive web app that helps referee managers improve referee performance, knowledge and satisfaction.
Challenge
To help sports organisations streamline their processes and get timely, relevant data to enable them to make their referees better.
Users
Referee managers, their supervisors/assessors and referees for any sport.
Role
I was the sole designer responsible for UX, UI, branding and copy writing.
Analysis, Empathy, UX
We took a MVP approach – to design and deliver a strong core initial product which we could later leverage user feedback and behavioural data from to extend and improve. With tight deadlines I rapidly explored stakeholder and user requirements to identify key features. There were no current competitors as most organisations used paper assessments and reports and shared impromptu knowledge quizzes via social media, so the need for a unified digital interface was clear. It required separate interfaces – desktop-focussed in-depth management tools and results data for administrators and mobile tools for supervisors to submit live assessments and reports directly from the site.
User flows helped understand the feature set and provide a view of where to start – what was essential for MVP – and inform development requirements so they could proceed with back-end preparations as I moved through wireframes. This gave a better functional overview, with the occasional prototype to engage stakeholders and offer basic testing of flow and interactions.
Brand, UI & Patterns
I did visual research into referees in their environments and sketched options until I came up with a logo the product owner loved – it references the iconic striped shirt referees often wear and the soaring direction represents striving for betterment. I used a very simple black and white scheme and flat design for the first iteration of the UI to reinforce the logo and typical referee colours. As we moved into and through development I created a style guide and began building a pattern library to support developers and to simplify and streamline the UI. We also used internal testing sessions with myself, the developers and stakeholders to review both user experience and implementation of features before commiting them.
The Dashboard
The admin dashboard gave referee managers a unified, current view of referee performance with graphical data offering deeper insight. We also created a tool to guide them through getting the best from the product and thereby the most from their referees.
Assessments
We created a mobile tool for supervisors to conduct easy, fast assessments of referees at the game which could be instantly submitted and viewed by managers in their admin view.
Assessments
We created a mobile tool for supervisors to conduct easy, fast assessments of referees at the game which could be instantly submitted and viewed by managers in their admin view.
Education
We created admin tools to enable organisations to create custom quizzes – relevant to their own rules – and to schedule them for their referees. Referees would receive an email link to a URL – easily accessible anywhere – to answer quick mini-quizzes which would both test and reinforce their knowledge. Results and overall grades were fed directly to the manager interface.
Reports
Within the supervisor view we added the ability to report on-site issues instantly – medical , OHS, facilities, player reports and incidents of abuse – a huge problem at games, providing managers with immediate visibility of issues and enabling them to track patterns and respond faster.
Reports
Within the supervisor view we added the ability to report on-site issues instantly – medical , OHS, facilities, player reports and incidents of abuse – a huge problem at games, providing managers with immediate visibility of issues and enabling them to track patterns and respond faster.
Satisfaction
We created a simple, easily tailored survey for both referees and community to help managers measure satisfaction, and built in feedback options to help them deepen their awareness of pain points and successes.
The Outcome
I left The Best Ref before it had launched to market so was unable to benefit from usage data or feedback on its successes or failures. Personally however, I feel the IA needed a restructure as it had become unwieldy with stakeholder requirements growing through the process of feature design and delivery, challenging the MVP. Also, I think the UI for the mobile targeted view for supervisors should have been cleaner and more visual. We had focussed primarily on the administrator view – adding what were considered features essential to successfully marketing it to organisations, and while the supervisor mobile view was functionally ok, it lacked the visual elegance expected by most users today for hand held mobile tools.