USA TODAY Sports NCAA Brackets

Role: UX Design, Creative Direction
Category: UX Design, Product Design, Creative Direction

As part of the migration of USA TODAY Sports Media Group’s flagship products to Gannett’s platform, the NCAA Bracket Challenge had to be completely rebuilt from the ground up—under a tight timeline. The primary goals were to enable users to create and share private pools, join USA TODAY's public pools, and manage multiple brackets, each assignable to various public or private pools.

We began by revisiting the user flow, focusing on simplifying and streamlining the process of joining a pool—whether users were creating their own or accepting an invitation. Once teams are announced on Selection Sunday, users can create and fill out brackets, assigning one bracket to each pool they’ve joined.

To organize this experience, we introduced a user dashboard with clear separation between brackets and pools, making it easy to manage both. For bracket navigation, we designed an interface that allowed users to move between rounds via intuitive swipe gestures or by selecting regional tabs. Each round view subtly included portions of the adjacent rounds to provide context, with smooth animations snapping into place as users navigated through their picks.

Before Selection Sunday, users can create pools and invite their friends to compete. Once the teams are announced, any user can create multiple brackets and assign them to however many pools they have joined. ↓

Due to the various 'states' of pre-tournament, post-Selection Sunday, and live in-progress games, combined with various points of entry (logging in through the landing page, receiving an invite from a friend) complex wireframing and userflows were critical to mapping out the user's journey. ↓

© Evan Russell 2024