The Referee Portal is a new digital tool offered by The FA, to be used by Match Officials for recording any in-game events and disciplinary actions. It is designed to slot into the Discipline Suite of products used by different actors throughout the English football, to better manage and respond to playing infringements within organised football–from The Premier League to grassroots.
The portal is primarily designed to collect data and which would be shared with local leagues, County FAs, and the clubs of the infringing players (in future; managers, assistants, etc.) with the aim of making the disciplinary process much more efficient for modern football
- Product Designer (Me)
- Head of Design
- Product Manager & Product Owner
- Lead Frontend Developer (+ Development Team, less involved day-to-day)
- Senior UX Designer (present for first half of project, left role in August)
- User Experience (UX) Design
- Information Architecture (IA)
- User Research & Analysis
- Design System Creation / Maintenance
- Interaction Design
- Stakeholder Management
- Product Strategy
- Iconography & (some) Branding
- The total project lifespan was from May 1st 2023 - Nov 30th 2023 (7 sprints)
- My involvement was from Aug 21st (3 sprints + 1 week)
- One month sprint cycles
- Two week design discovery
- One week developer discovery phase
- One week hardening phase
Reevaluating the complexity of the initial solution
Due to the Referee Portal being a completely new offering from The FA, with an aim to integrate it with multiple different portals, on top of the knowledge that all of these portals would also be new, or require large overhauls, alongside a backend and codebase migration project to move all of the infrastructure onto a new communication model.
There was a lot of research which was undertaken prior to any design work starting.
This meant we ran many interview sessions and workshops to understand as much as we could about the role of every party involved within the disciplinary process. The referee portal itself consisted of 4 individual interview/testing phases - two of which I wasn’t a part of due to not being with The FA yet.
- The FA, and local governing bodies, wanted to collect as much data as the match officials could provide from every match they officiated. This meant the post match data collection flow was quite long and contained many steps.
- Outside of top tier football (Premier League, Championship, etc.) the majority of match officials were part time, and had other jobs outside of their referee roles, as well as families.
- There was no age restrictions on being a match official, so long as you were able to pass fitness assessments, it didn’t matter whether you were 16 or 65. You could officiate youth games from a young age, and adult games once you have more experience.
- Something which became clear from my first interview session was the number of interviewees who struggled with using Microsoft Teams on their devices - many expressed their dislike for "these phones and computers".
- I brought this to the attention of the rest of the team, and we all agreed to add questions into our interviews to gauge ‘tech savviness’. This ended up being a good move as we learned that the original plan for the referee portal was too complex and didn’t mesh well with the general public's tech ability, as well as their busy lives.
It was easy to convince the design, product & tech teams of the new - simplified - approach, but it took some more workshops and interactive prototypes to convince senior FA staff.
Once I was ‘handed over the reigns’ to the design of the referee portal, I wanted to employ our findings from the final two interview phases to push for simplification of the interface and flow, qualitative feedback showed that our users didn’t engage with the initial approach – a long iFrame plugin within their local FA website containing every field/form to be completed in a single sitting.
My recommendation was to separate the process into a "check-pointed flow", allowing users to better place themselves and create a mental model as to the task at hand.
Along with using our development time to create a portal for match officials using their FA credentials – similar to the portals we were creating for club admins, local FA staff, parents of young children, medical staff, etc.
It was a pretty straightforward process to convince the design and tech teams of the validity of this solution compared to the more complicated one, especially using the interview feedback.
The initial difficulties arose in convincing the more senior members of the FA into being comfortable that we could achieve this goal within the budgeted time, and whether the simplification would actually encourage more reports.
The new flow:
*I have oversimplified the steps to highlight the grouping of tasks, this is an oversimplified version of the final flow.
- Create a match (if the FA system didn’t automatically register a match, unlikely but possible)
- Role defintion
- Offence details
- Created cases (with option to add more cases/offences)
Eventually everyone was on board and I worked alongside the head of design and head of product to build a proposal for the iterations we'd require from the MVP launch, until we reached the ideal interaction and flow.
Beginning the process to ensure The FA become AA compliant across all of their products
The FA set a mission to bring all of their products up to AA standard within the next 5 years, and the referee portal would be the first product to be launched meeting all of the criteria. This required multiple iterations of designs to correctly communicate areas such as; errors and error correction, clear navigation between pages and important elements within the flow, an update to the existing design system (a whole other project in itself). However, we were able to cross 6 month line and attain the AA standard from a third party audit – meaning we had succeeded on beginning the process.
At the time my contract ended (end of football season) the Referee Portal hadn’t been released for public use, as The FA only launch new products alongside new football seasons - as such, I am unable to provide much data on usage. However, pre-release usage data showed a more than 80% of initial testers were using the portal regularly, alongside qualitative feedback suggesting a lot of enthusiasm for a public launch and improvements to come.
One match official commented on how this would be life saver for himself and other officials, remarking that he currently spends at least 2 hours a day on both Saturday and Sunday writing up his match reports - and with the new portal he can see it getting completed in 15 to 30 mins tops.
"It’s been a pleasure working alongside Mahfuz. He has a deep understanding of the ins and outs of product design, including the importance of data and talking to users. His rich knowledge of accessibility has been incredibly useful, I’ll surely miss picking his brain. Not only that, he’s a lovely guy and pleasure to spend time with, hope our paths cross again."
– Senior UX Designer
"Mahfuz is great to work with, not least because he is extremely likable and charismatic - but also due to his ability to modify and refine existing design patterns. Mahfuz really helps myself as a Product Owner due to his understanding of when and where we could improve designs, whilst not confusing the development teams or taking us away from our previous style guides. I really enjoyed working with him and will miss him being part of the team.
Mahfuz has great ability to fit in with an established team with established design patterns, or with a brand new team/product."
– Product Owner
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