Mr. Yuk ultimate website

I redesigned and implemented designs for the Mr. Yuk ultimate frisbee website. (Mr. Yuk is the CMU men’s ultimate frisbee team)

Overview

Impact

+300%

increase in average page views

The problem

The website was outdated and the limited visual content on the site didn’t represent the culture of the team.


Biggest research insight

For Potential Recruit Pete, proving through season results that the team was “good” was a high priority.

My role

UX designer & developer

  • User interviews

  • Information architecture

  • Prototyping

  • Usability testing

  • Interaction design

  • HTML, CSS, JQuery

Personas

  • Other sport Omar

    • Persona quote - “[I’m] looking for a decent level of competition and low key team camaraderie…”

  • Potential recruit Pete

    • Persona quote - “I want a team that takes it fairly seriously and hopefully is not bad so I can learn…”

  • New student Nate

    • Persona quote - “I hated cross country. I like playing frisbee… how can I get involved?”

  • Alumni Adam

    • Persona quote - “It’s meaningful for me to know the history I’m a part of”

Timeframe

5 months - UX + Eng work

Final concept

Primary CTA flow

The primary conversion for New Student Nate and Other Sport Omar is to add them to the team email list. The landing page CTA makes this easy by only requiring an email, removing the friction of a user having to think about what to write in a message.

Secondary CTA flow

The contact page tells Potential Recruit Pete where CMU is located, an important part of understanding the team, while providing self-deprecating copy and a fun interaction.

Demonstrating team culture

For Other Sport Omar and Potential Recruit Pete, I wanted highlight reels to be easily accessible to show the ability and culture of the team, the latter being reinforced by a hidden easter egg interaction.

The process

User personas

To create these personas, I used interviews, surveys, and old emails from team members when they were first accepted to CMU.

Persona for "Other Sport Omar"
Persona for "Potential Recruit Pete"
Persona for "New Student Nate"
Persona for "Alumni Adam"

Usability testing

I ran multiple think aloud user tests, for example, asking users how they would find “team info”. I combined the “team info” and “history” pages from the old website into the “about” page and wanted to test if this would confuse users.

Gif of a usability test where the user was able to find the "team info" under the "about" page

User flows

Some of the persona goals, for example, “see if the team is good”, weren’t easy to translate into exact conversions, making the exact flows a bit challenging at times.

Diagram showing a persona being connected to a user flow

My reflection

What was I right about?
I was right that coding the website, in addition to designing it, would be a much richer learning experience.

What was I wrong about?
Based on metrics from the original website, mobile usage was rare, so I didn’t use a mobile first approach. However, I think the limited mobile usage on the original website was likely because the site wasn’t mobile friendly.

What would I do differently?
I would’ve checked accessibility on every page and spent more time making the website easy to update.