SportsGraf
Task
SportsGraf is a high utility informational tool and database built for The Dallas Morning News sports staff.
Overview
High school sports is highly regarded in the state of Texas. There is a very niche group of athletes, parents, sports recruiters, and the general sports fan that makes up this type of audience. At The Dallas Morning News, there is a team of journalists that cover the high school sports scene across North Texas. These reporters have access to sport reporting and numerical data about high school games, players, high school teams, district data, and more. However, the reporting team did not have a way of presenting this data on the website.
Sitemap
The sitemap helped our development team understand the structure and taxonomy of the pages under the high school sports section. This also helped the product team envision how and where the sports data should be displayed and accessed by users.
UI/UX
I identified the different use cases of the data that the runners were inputting into the database and provided a guide of how it should be displayed on the front end. Different data elements were displayed depending on a number of factors like when a game was just a preview, when a game was currently live, and when a game was finalized.
The Result
We organized the data and built a database and tool for the sports reporters. The tool allowed the sports reporter staff and runners to input Texas high school sports data that was then displayed on the high school sports section of the website. SportsGraf powered live play-by-plays (football game pages), game schedules and scores, district information, and team and player information. Readers could sort through the information and find the data on whole districts or a specific high school.
