Role: Lead UX UI Designer
Team: Alfonzo 'Zo' Burton (UX Magicians CCO), Harsha Viswanathan (Verizon Sports Technology and Innovation), Anthony Amos (Executive Producer), Kyle Brickner (Executive Producer), Steven (Engineer-Martian Games), Patrick Bibeau (Engineer), Iman Khabazian(Engineer) & Dan Parker (Engineer)
Platform: iPAD (Tablets) and iPhone (Smart Phones)
Overview
Goals: As Lead UI/UX Designer contracted through UX Magicians, I was brought on to support a collaboration between Verizon and the Phoenix Suns on a Sports, Analytics, and Performance App. The goal was to research and develop emerging technologies that enhance athletic performance and team operations through intelligent design and data-driven insights.
I was tasked with creating an adaptive, role-based app experience tailored to coaches, trainers, and players, ensuring each role had the right tools and information at the right time. Additionally, the project aimed to improve the user experience of internal creation tools, enabling content and data creators to build high-quality experiences more efficiently while maintaining a consistent design standard across the platform.
Challenges: I was responsible for researching and defining problem spaces, developing a shared language and taxonomy that aligned with the role-based personas, and ensuring the design reflected how coaches, trainers, and players communicate and operate within their organization. The primary objective of the project was to design key features such as Workout of the Day, calendars, chat messaging, and communication based features to improve communication, scheduling, and team coordination.
The project faced several obstacles, including poor planning from leadership, limited communication, unclear roadmaps, and unrealistic timelines, all of which made coordination and prioritization difficult. Working with a fully remote team across the United States, Canada, and other regions, I learned and adopted Figma for prototyping to improve collaboration and maintain design consistency across time zones and disciplines.
Another challenge was maintaining the art direction and visual style, which featured heavy use of glows and layered effects. These stylistic choices created performance and component management issues in Figma, making visual upkeep complex and time-consuming. Additionally, the director’s desire for a drag-and-drop mechanic in the Workout of the Day feature raised usability concerns and led to differences in design approach and user experience priorities.
A major challenge also involved creating and defining persona goals for coaches, trainers, and players without direct access to real users. Even with my basketball background, it was difficult to capture authentic professional workflows and motivations without first-hand feedback, requiring continuous iteration and informed assumptions to shape the user experience.
Solutions: Drawing on my background as a basketball fan and former player, I used research and creative problem-solving to develop realistic use cases and motivations that reflected each role’s needs, ensuring the final concepts felt authentic, functional, and user-centered within the project’s constraints.
I designed and prototyped a calendar system, created detailed UX personas, and identified the goals and needs of each primary user group—coaches, trainers, and players. I also mind-mapped a health process scenario for an ankle injury, developing a deep understanding of injury management workflows. To better visualize recovery timelines, I studied a “return-to-play” process video by Adam Loiacono and built a mind map around a real basketball game scenario to capture the trainer’s perspective.
From there, I developed Coach and Trainer Workout taxonomies, drawing inspiration and structure from platforms like Peloton and Future to define logical and motivational workout flows. I created a Workout of the Day feature connecting trainers to players, supporting customized sessions based on fitness goals and injury conditions.
These combined efforts led to the delivery of three successful and approved prototype milestones reviewed and accepted by the Verizon development team, establishing a strong foundation for future iterations of the sports performance platform.
Outcome: As Lead UI/UX Designer for UX Magicians, collaborating with Verizon and the Phoenix Suns, I successfully led a remote development team through three key milestones, delivering a functional prototype concept optimized for both iPad tablets and mobile devices. The prototype showcased a cohesive Sports, Analytics, and Performance app designed to support the daily operations and communication of a professional basketball organization.
Verizon and the Phoenix Suns were pleased with the project’s progress, noting the quality, consistency, and clarity of the user experience across each milestone. I created a simple, adaptive design system that addressed the unique needs of various personas and roles, including coaches, trainers, players, and staff, ensuring each user journey was intuitive and purpose driven.
The app featured a suite of organizational tools including calendars, chat messaging, tickets, workouts, and nutrition tracking, all unified within a streamlined interface. The outcome demonstrated how thoughtful UX design, collaboration, and clear communication could translate complex team workflows into a polished and practical digital experience.
Milestone III (Product Development Demo) iOS iPAD tablet
In this demo, you see different roles within the Phoenix Suns organization that will take you on a variety of user journey's. In this view we take you on the trainer's user journey of building a custom workout and scheduling players that workout. It also shows saved rosters depending on the health status, contacts when welcoming new players into the organization, leaderboards for how many workouts are completed, and ticketing user flow for when players want friends and family to reserve seats to a game.
User Roles and Personas
Part of my research was to understand the various roles and jobs of Health care, trainers and workouts, players and coaches to the admin of operations.
UX Research
Various UX research studies was done to get some data and insights about the specific jobs & roles the players, trainers and coaching staff does year around on and off season and what can happen if a player gets hurt, has surgery and their workouts and diet changes during the season.
Trainer Workouts Taxonomy
User Persona for Athletic Trainer
Health Process Scenario- Ankle Injury
Much of the inspiration in the UI UX came products and innovation of Apple Health, Nike Run, Peloton, MyFitnessPal & FUTURE.CO.
'Workout of the Day' Explorations
Workout of the day (WOTD) was an initially intended to accommodate the trainer and the players persona.
Workout Summary Concept
Location Based Concept
3D Simulation Concept
LIVE Event Concept
Scheduling Concept
Scheduling Concept
Creating workout Concept
Workout Library Concept
'Workout of the Day' Exploration Prototypes
Some of the key elements in this prototype are:
• Needed the ability for the trainer to assign a highlight workout for the day.
• Needed the ability to see a schedule or calendar for the players. The trainer would manage the player.
• Needed the ability to see all the workouts that are catalogued, search, navigate and drag them into the calendar.
• Needed the ability to see view the team's roster.
• Our Creative Director required that the user interaction needed to be a drag & drop, which is challenging on device.
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WebGL prototype proof of concept:
• Later my initial prototype was implemented into a WebGL prototype with no backend implementation as a proof of concept.
Milestone 3 Deliverables
Milestone 1: App Macro Flow
Lots of Feature Prototypes dealing with Ticketing Requests and Approvals, Group Chat, Team Schedule and Stat Leaders, Nutrionists dietary logging, to many more user persona role-based user experiences
