The problem

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has been the Canadian rights holder of the Olympic Games for a number of years, however the Tokyo 2020 Olympics were the first time in many years that the website was created in-house — giving more internal control over the experience.

This presented an exciting and interesting challenge; how to serve the needs of an Olympics audience while also integrating the experience within our pre-existing website.

What we did

To start, we needed to re-orient ourselves in the Olympic space. It had been a couple years since the previous Olympics, so we started by reviewing past Olympic research. We also touched back in with our audience in order to establish an understanding of the needs our experience should be serving. From there, design work started. Because we were working within a lot of our pre-existing website constraints, high fidelity mocks were created early on. This presented an opportunity to test these mocks, both to assess usability, but also to assess if we were successfully serving the key Olympic needs of our audience.

We ran a series of remote usability tests, on both desktop and mobile prototypes, that showed us where we were hitting the mark and where we could improve. From there, design changes were made prior to development work starting. For example, we learned it was hard for users to find live video in our current design. We knew this was a key need we had to serve, so a few changes were made to the experience that proved highly effective when the Olympic games were live.

Although the games were delayed by a year, and we’d worked on other projects, we wanted to continue our cycle of learning and conduct research while the Tokyo Olympics were happening. We had a number of research questions we wanted answered, so took on a mixed-method approach. We conducted in-depth interviews and usability tests with 30 members of our Olympics audience while the games were live. This allowed us to collect live feedback of our experience. We also ran an in-product survey, filled out by over 2,000 audience members, in order to collect in the moment feedback. Finally, we paired these learnings with quantitative metrics, in order to better understand pathing & key consumption habits.

From this mixed-method approach we learned a lot about behaviours, needs, pathways and pain points. These learnings were then applied to the Beijing 2022 Olympics website.

My role

As the primary researcher on this project, I was responsible for creating & communicating the research plan, designing the interview guide & survey, recruiting participants, moderating interviews, analyzing the results, and presenting the learnings to colleagues and stakeholders — working closely with design, product & stakeholders the entire process.

Example artifact: User Journey

Created prior to the Tokyo Olympics, based on discovery research, in order to understand how to serve our audience leading up to, during, and after the Olympic games.

Example artifact: User Needs

Clearly communicating the needs of our Olympic users is essential for future product and design strategy work. From our various research methods, we defined four key user needs and structured our report around them.