Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Dakota Berg

Over the last year I have had the pleasure of working on one of the most exciting new live video apps on the market, SportsCastr.Live, alongside the extremely talented top-tier teams at SGI Pixel, SGI MB, IdeaQuest & more. As the Lead Designer (and the first hire), I have helped shape the SportsCastr brand and platform from just an idea to a world-class app with celebrity advisors and investors that include David Stern, Jim Boeheim, Vernon Davis, Steve Smith, Donald Schupak & many others. I believe live video is the future of social media and sharing, and this platform is both disruptive and game changing, pun intended. Here are 5 major lessons I learned first-hand building SportsCastr from the ground up.

Donald Schupak, Jim Boeheim & Kevin April Streaming on SportsCastr.Live

1) Place your CTA’s carefully.

This one was learned the hard way. The front-facing camera on a mobile device is extremely close to the right side of the screen and has a fairly wide angled lens, so any buttons near the camera resulted in finger tips covering the screen as the broadcaster tried to navigate. And here’s the thing, nobody wants to see your cheeto-covered hangnails at any point during your stream.

SportsCastr App Splash Screen

2) Screen real-estate is valuable.

As somebody making product decisions, we get pelted with feature requests, ideas and other new and exciting things to add on a daily basis. Not everything always makes it in, but the goal is always to keep the UI as clean as possible while providing a lot of functionality without degrading the user experience. SportsCastr is a camera app at it’s core and the screen real estate is extremely valuable. Along with the professional scorebug and bottom third graphics, we also needed to include live chat for viewers, sharing functionality and broadcaster controls. Not all features make it in, and some get cut along the way. We launched the SportsCastr app with a picture-in-picture type of feature, but found out quickly that it took up an enormous amount of screen real-estate and wasn’t a very popular feature at the time. Will it be back one day? You’ll have to wait and see.

3) The team is everything.

Prior to working on SportsCastr, I don’t think I had ever been surrounded by as many accomplished and talented professionals. Talent attracts talent and the first few hires are paramount. Not everybody has to stick with the team for the long haul, but a core team member leaving a startup at the wrong time without handing off all the necessary files can be catastrophic. Luckily, our team transitions have been smooth and the SportsCastr team is stronger and growing faster than ever.

4) You are amongst the giants.

Immediately upon launching, SportsCastr was compared and contrasted to the behemoths in the live video industry such as Periscope, Facebook Live, Live.Me & others with development teams 100x the size of ours. We did extensive market research to find the best practices and what experiences seemed to be the smoothest. Our CTO developed an innovative solution to latency issues that generally prevent other live streaming apps from serving the sports world, getting our latency under 2 seconds, the fastest in the industry. How do you compete with the largest companies that control a burgeoning industry? Just make a better product.

“Just make a better product.”

5) Some cameras reflect the image.

Front-facing cameras on mobile devices reflect the image so it appears as though you’re looking in a mirror, so words & logos will appear backwards. We ran into this issue with a Step & Repeat backdrop which featured the SportsCastr logo and logomark in a repeating pattern. If broadcasting from a mobile device, the backdrop appears backwards but if broadcast from a laptop, the backdrop appears normal. Live & learn.

If you want to try out the SportsCastr.Live App, download it on the App Store or visit the SportsCastr.Live Website.

About the author

Dakota is an entrepreneur & designer from the Pacific Northwest. Founder of DKTB Design, Partner at Black Hatchet & Lead Designer at SportsCastr.Live

5 Lessons I Learned Building A Live Video Platform From The Ground Up was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

5 Lessons I Learned Building A Live Video Platform From The Ground Up

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