CBC Gem Olympics - Cinthya Flores

CBC Gem Olympics REDESIGN

Making CBC Gem Olympics an inclusive experience for a multicultural audience.

My Role

UX Research
UX-UI Design
Prototyping

Client

CBC Gem (potential)

Overview

CBC Gem is now your one-stop app to enjoy your favorite events in the Olympics and support your country’s athletes.

The Problem

Since I was little, I got used to watching the Olympics. When a Mexican athlete competed, we would watch the competition live whether we were at the school, a restaurant, or home.

However, having experienced two Olympics in Canada ( Tokyo 2021 and Beijing 2022), I didn’t feel the same. None of my friends and colleagues would watch them, although they would know about their country’s athletes’ results. I wanted to look into it and understand why foreign people like me wouldn’t watch the Olympics and if there was a way to help them enjoy them as if they were back home.

USER RESEARCH

I did surveys and interviews with friends and colleagues from different countries to understand their points of view.

Are you used to watching the Olympics?

What’s your approach when watching the Olympics?

Where do you currently watch them?

Insights of the Surveys and Interviews

Watching the national athletes competing at the Olympics was a family activity back in their country for most of them.

Open TV would mostly stream competitions where national athletes would compete, so people wouldn’t need to choose what to watch.

70% of the people who watch the Olympics don’t like to get spoiled by the news, so they prefer to watch it live.

Although most of them watch them on Social and Youtube, 45% said they would rather watch the whole competition instead of fragments (which is the traditional content displayed on these channels).

In Mexico, we would highlight and broadly support only Mexican athletes; however, in Canada, having a culturally diverse population makes more than one-fifth of the total population support another country apart from Canada.

You can only support one country in the official Olympics app. But what about immigrants who want to follow their origin countries and Canadian athletes?

Olympics Official App

Using the CBC Gem App

I selected people who used to watch the Olympics before and asked them to look for a competition where an athlete of their origin country participated through the CBC Gem app. (Some people already used the CBC Gem App on this group).

They would get confused on where to look for a specific event.

They would check online or in the Olympics app to know the date and time for a particular event. If it were a past event, they would get spoiled.

They would write the information down and set a manual alarm for an upcoming event.

Most of them would use more than three apps (Browser, Olympics app, Alarm, and CBC Gem) when selecting what to watch.

Some of them would like to watch the entire process from qualification, semifinals, and finals, but it gets confusing since there’s only a calendar-based event display.

Current CBC GEM App

Reviews recovered from Google Play Store and Apple Store.

Design Process

How might international people have a better experience when watching the Olympics?

I did several iterations to solve the leading issues mentioned in the research.

I tried to make the solution as simple as possible, so integrating the new buttons and screens would still feel like part of the app.

Also, I know that the app doesn’t feature text descriptions of the events and might not have each athlete’s information, so my solution focused on informing the user about the events he would be interested in with visual elements.