The Brief

A review of England Netball’s key user journeys to identify improvements that could enhance user experience and increase revenue generation.

The Client

England Netball is responsible for governing netball and supporting those involved in the sport. As well as delivering the the Netball Super League – the top-level domestic netball competition in the UK – they also facilitate a huge number of netball programme sessions, provide membership schemes and and offer learning and development courses for officials.

A screenshot showing mid-fidelity concepts for part of a re-imagined membership signup journey.

Our Solution

1. Usability Testing

Looking at how we might improve the UX of their online booking and membership platform, we first started with usability testing of the existing platform with three key user groups: course purchasers, membership purchasers and netball session finders.

These were scripted, facilitated 1:1 usability sessions, with the Outlandish team setting ‘missions’ for them to complete via the platform. The aim was to tease out the pain points, confusions and opportunities within the existing offering, all whilst the wider England Netball team observed.

2. Heuristic Review

Next, we got busy with the marker pen.

A heuristic review is pretty exciting for User Experience geeks, and involves the UX lead reviewing the platform’s key user journeys and critiquing it according to UX and usability best-practice.

We flagged:

These issues, combined with the insights from the usability testing, were categorised into Quick Win tweaks, Medium Effort changes, and Big Ticket items that could be addressed by the England Netball team and their platform suppliers.

A screenshot showing the annotated markup of screens from one of the key user journeys of the England Netball platform.

3. Mid-fidelity prototyping

Outlandish’s designer now took the usability testing learnings and the UX recommendations to create mid-fidelity interactives (unbranded, unstyled designs that indicate on-page functionality and flows).

Now usually, when we prototype, we are working on a recommended design approach to take forward into later build.

But at this point England Netball’s digital team wanted to imagine bold, new ways they could approach online. They needed an inspiration piece for internal stakeholders and the platform suppliers. 

So, yes, our prototypes aimed to show how best practice UX principles might be borne in mind for online usability, but we also chose to strip things back to basics. To make things super efficient. And to show how paying heed to online users’ needs could lead to change to their wider systems: i.e. how they curate, organise and coordinate their in-person events and membership offerings.

A screenshot showing mid-fidelity concepts for part of a re-imagined session finder journey.

4. Product roadmapping

Next we ran a product roadmapping workshop with England Netball and their platform suppliers.

This set a user value proposition for the improved digital ecosystem, and plotted new functional capabilities – as well as the identified Quick Win, Medium effort and Big-Ticket improvements – across a series of build phases. The decisions were based on the value delivered by each to users, the potential effort required of the team to deliver them, their scale of impact, and dependencies. 

A screenshot from our roadmapping workshop showing low effort, medium effort and high effort changes plotted over work phases.

5. Final report + design history documentation

Finally, we built a project ‘design history’ for the wider team and senior stakeholders.

Built as a standalone website powered by Notion, it told the narrative of the work done, the decisions made and how (and why) the team reached this vision for a digital future. Plus it was replete with all the creative work, workshop outputs, Miro boards, synthesis etc should anyone want to dive deep into the thinking.Creating a design history is something that we want to embrace more at Outlandish for our clients. If you’d like to read up more about them for your own projects, take a look at this post on design histories by a member of the gov.uk team.

A screenshot from our Notion design history.

A screenshot from our Notion design history.

Going On

The work with England Netball was a great project and a fantastic experience for us: really juicy, complex problems, and a chance to help shift the way that digital works for the organisation too – touching upon wider systems and how they offer their offline services.

At the end of the project we presented the Design History to England Netball’s Executive team and it prompted much debate. We look forward to checking in with them in the next year to see how it’s helped them in their strategy.

Cover photo by Joe Le Mare on Unsplash