I'll have to be honest - this project was awesome to work on but it was also a very odd setup for me, the designer. So I'm a huge sports guy and a longtime friend of mine knew that and that I did digital design and such for a living. So when his family friend dropped out of the NYSE scene to start a sports marketing analytics company that was leveraging AI he thought an introduction between the two of us was warranted.

It was! The oddness of the setup was because of the very startup nature of the project. And no - for once it wasn't the money, that was there. It was the choppy nature of what they needed/wanted design wise. They needed stuff up front for investment decks and pitches and the like - so some stuff that maybe wasn't 100% what we were going to end up with because they didn't know exactly what that was yet.

There was a lot of stop in go in those first two years, but in 2022 we finally got to the point where we were putting together real screens.

I like to consider myself a fairly intelligent individual - and a lot of people involved in this project made me feel like I had caveman levels of technology knowledge. My involvement was showing the output and information gathered by their insane AI tools to the clients within their portal and that was super fun. There was an overload of information so working with the engineers in formatting that hierarchy ended up being a large part of the actual deliverables as far as the templating went.

The smart guys will laugh at this explanation, but I'll give it a shot. We'll use golf for the example (because that's what they always used when trying desperately to explain things to me). Their AI tools and programs would take all of the broadcasted footage of an event and then bring back all of the information related to when advertisements, billboards, signs, etc. where show on screen. They covered everything you could think of and more, all the way down to the headcovers and logos on golf shirts and caddies. Then there were comparisons with the viewer numbers and target demographics and all kinds of things.

On a challenge level - I didn't let the team know this, and I didn't have to stress about it because of the "no deadline" situation - this was the toughest thing project I've had to work on. The concept itself, especially in the early stages, was fluid and quite literally a moving target from a UX standpoint. AI is to this day an evolving beast so early on it barely even had a shape. We all got used to just having to accept the fact that sometimes a screen or maybe entire section of a portal would be thrown out.

There was also the challenge that nothing like this existed. I've worked on plenty of information display based portals (dashboards for Autotrader, back ends of finance/investment companies, etc.) but there was no research opportunities available to because there was no sports marketing AI generated analytics platforms to look at.

The solution that we came up to handle this information overload and layout complexity was overwhelmingly simple: we sat down and worked together, engineers, founders and sales and design all on one call.

It sounds volatile, I'll admit.

"These people don't work together!"

"That's too many voices in one room."

"Poor designer."

It worked out amazingly. We were adults and found a format that worked - when we had a section of the portal fairly agreed up, we'd all get together to go over screens. We had a document that anyone could throw notes in before the meeting, and we'd use those throughout just as reference. I would have lo-fi wireframes put together going in and then we would just start from there. There were a couple of times on some simpler screens where I actually nailed it! A couple...

At the end of the day, the clients - who are anyone interested in advertising in sports marketing - received detail analytics of when would be best for them to advertise their particular products or services.

Since this project was by nature disjointed and done in chunks, it was a very, very iterative design process. Our first chunk was building a design system which was absolutely necessary since going in we knew this was going to be a moving target. The early front-end was built using Bootstrap so I used that as the basis for our design system. This also started before the overtake of Figma so it was the last project I worked on based in Adobe XD.

Revelations on the AI engineering side would happen so almost every time these updates (albeit amazing, necessary and awesome) were brought into the mix we'd have to go back and update the sections and screens that we already had. In the long run this was actually a very cathartic and unifying process for the UX side of the application.

Looking back - we've worked out a system that works for this out-of-the-norm type of project. It was tough to gain a rhythm in the beginning being a startup in a very new space, but once we got the ball rolling we've gained direction and have been able to deliver a product that people are happy with. The product is still in it's early stages but this was a great learning experience in leading a brand-spanking-new project.