P002 → Sports Communities @ B/R

Created a UGC fan experience in the B/R app, enabling thousands of fans to connect and share content within their dedicated team communities, transforming fan interaction into a dynamic and thriving aspect of the app.

Overview

Bleacher Report, a sports media company, established its value proposition in the sports media industry by allowing users to follow specific teams, instead of offering a general news feed for all users. In their shift from a news and content app to a social media platform, their objective was to facilitate safe and constructive conversations among the numerous fans of the same team. The emphasis was on fostering dialogue within individual team communities, steering clear of interactions with fans of other teams to ensure the discussions remained healthy and constructive.

This project aimed to test the hypothesis that allowing users to post to streams would facilitate the formation of communities within the app. The first milestone involved adding posts to streams as a foundational step in community creation. It was essential to recognize that alternative methods for building communities existed, and the project was designed as a test. The scope was narrowed for rapid implementation, with plans to iterate in future milestones for ongoing enhancements and optimizations. The goal was to assess the effectiveness of stream-based posting in community formation while remaining open to evolving strategies in subsequent iterations.

Scoping

As this project centered around a broad concept, I collaborated with my product manager and engineering lead to precisely define the scope. This strategic approach aimed to expedite the design and launch process.

Use the Post & Composer feature that is already built.

From a Product & Design perspective, posts are high quality content that can structure conversations in the community around topics (posts).
From an Engineering perspective, we do not want to build a new UGC tool. We will be able to test this hypothesis faster using features that are already built.

Keep UGC posts & B/R news tracks separate.

From an Engineering perspective, it will be faster to build these streams separately and blend them later if needed.
From a Programming perspective, we do not want a user’s hot take to be misinterpreted as B/R official programmed news. Since posts and tracks look similar today, keeping them separate is the easiest way to avoid this situation.
From a Design perspective, I want the community to be able to go to a dedicated place to interact with each other.

Contain the distribution to only the team stream.

To minimize scope and edge cases, we are containing the distribution of community posts to streams only. In the future, we will explore distribution to Home, News stream, other streams, etc.

Fans should see the Community Rules.

To help foster a healthy community, we believe that users should see Community Rules and agree to them before they are allowed to post. These community rules should be accessible after you agree to them.

When fans are in the community, they should know when there are new posts.

We want communities to feel alive. Our first step toward this is to let users know in real time when there are new posts in the community.
For M1, we are only focusing on users who are in the community right now. In the future we can explore notifying fans that are not in the community or not in the app.

Measuring Success

Hypothesis

We can build communities around teams if community members are able to post content to their community.

Goal

Team Goal: Build & test a Community MVP in H1.
Product Goal: We can build communities for sports fans.

KPIs

Community WAU: Track community members posting to the community each week.
Engagement on Posts: Track posts with 5+ fires and posts with 1 reply.
Community Funnels: Study the Lurker funnel, Participator funnel, and Creator funnel.

Brainstorming: Sports Communities

Before honing in on our narrow scope, we embarked on an expansive brainstorming session, envisioning the ideal future state for sports communities within the B/R app. This exercise fueled our vision and provided clarity on where to concentrate our efforts for the swift launch of a community MVP.

Wireframing

Utilizing the existing Post & Composer feature within the B/R app, we developed wireframes enabling users to post within their team stream. By placing the community in a separate tab, we achieved our objective of maintaining a clear separation between B/R news and user-generated content (UGC). The seperate tab also created a distinct "third place" for sports fans. Given the predominantly black-and-white UI of the B/R app, our wireframes were crafted in shades of blue to signal the wireframe phase to stakeholders.

Final Solution

Driving Users to Communities
We devised user flows strategically to increase community engagement by directing traffic into the communities. While certain elements may have been apparent to me, it was imperative to clearly articulate each flow and state to the engineering team, ensuring an accurate implementation aligned with my final design.

Fostering a Healthy Community
In order to cultivate a healthy community, we aimed to introduce a level of friction to the posting process. Users were required to acknowledge and agree to the community guidelines before gaining permission to post within a specific community. While this may not entirely prevent trolls from accessing a community, it serves as a clear signal that B/R actively moderates and will take action against users who violate the rules.

Accounting for Edge Cases
In tackling this project, we had to consider numerous edge cases given the novelty of the tool. A particular emphasis was placed on engaging users who were "logged out" and did not have an account. We designed compelling states to encourage these users to create an account and join the conversation.

Validating Communities

The project successfully introduced the MVP for communities within the B/R app. Upon launch, users actively started posting and engaging with the communities. Subsequent enhancements included the design of post carousels for surfacing community content outside of the community, the introduction of moderator badges and flows for moderators, and the incorporation of features like GIFs and images in posts. As of today, the Los Angeles Lakers' community boasts an impressive 1.3 million fans.

Next Project

Annie Pyle

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