The GAA website

The Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) is an Irish sporting and cultural or- ganisation. They asked for the enhancement of their website’s design fo- cusing on improving how users reach the information they want as well as promoting the vast video content they have. The aim is to attract more traffic and promote Gaelic sports. They want to reach both the old and new generation of fans around the world. One of the GAA’s goals was to give the site an editorial’s approach and show latest news about their main sports: Gaelic Football and Hurling. Ke- eping these sports’ tradition alive is their main goal as well as keeping up to date with the modern sport industry.

The ask: Redesign of the Desktop, Tablet and Mobile responsive website

My role: I was in charge of the UX and UI as well as improving content delivery and promotion across the website.

Teams I worked with: I worked closely with the client and the development team.

The impact: Promote the popularity of Gaelic sports and increase the amount of traffic on the website.

Fixtures & results

The problems

The previous website’s structure wasn’t providing an easy way to navigate to the page resulting in users ofter getting lost. Furthermore, once users reached the page, they couldn’t find the information they were looking for. The analytics showed that their main focus is to to check when a match starts, to see when their team plays next and to check the results of the previous games. The last problem was that there weren’t any visual clue to separate the Hurling matches from the Football ones.

What I’ve done and why

I decided to put the Fixtures & Results in the main navigation. I’ve taken this decision so that users could find it in a position they were expecting. It also gave them a way to reach the content easily.

After a wide competitor’s research, I came up with the idea of or- ganising the matches through a timeline. It would show today by default (today’s fixtures) as well as giving the chance to navigate to previous days (results) and following days (future fixtures).

I’ve created a two colours design system language where each sport and its related content have a specific colour: green for Football and purple for Hur- ling. The idea behind it is to make sure that the users can scan through the page and easily understand what match is what.

The GAA now

The problem

The GAA has got a vast archive of video content and they constantly record new videos every week. All the content is broadcasted on their “GAA Now” channel. In order to promote their videos and attract more traffic to the website, the team decided to introduce a new page dedicated to this type of content.

What I’ve done and why

Once again, I decided to introduce the GAA Now link in the top navigation bar. In addition to this, a banner will at the top of the home page would appear every time there is new video content available. This would give another chance to redirect users to the page.

I also decided to organise the videos in chronological order, from the most recent to the oldest, in an endless list of content. Competitor’s research highlighted that users are now looking mainly for the newest and most exclusive content available.

The final change was the addition of some filtering options to help search specific videos: it is defaulted to “all videos” but also gives the option to filter by county, code, match clips and rewinds. This page is another example where the two colours system has been used to visually separate the content.