Kilmarnock F.C.

Finishing Top 3 during their 150th-anniversary celebrations 2018-2019 was a pretty special season for Kilmarnock FC.

Killie selected See Saw as long-standing creative partners to capitalise on the joy surrounding the club, doing for the online Killie experience what Steve Clark had done for the offline. Although their existing website had served them well, its aesthetic had generally aged whilst user experience in terms of mobile + content layout meant most users found it difficult, if not sometimes frustrating to find + access the information they were looking for, especially on the move and at speed.

With monthly web visitors regularly topping 50,000 we firstly needed to realise where + how users might best interact with different content types. We established an external user testing group running card, tree + heatmap tests to allow us to create a sitemap; content hierarchy; wireframes + ultimately a website design that provided the information fans wanted in a highly efficient + engaging format.

Although ticket + merchandise sales were to be handled by new partners off-site, we needed to plan for the strategic placement of external links throughout to act as a successful revenue funnel for the club. After extensive renovations throughout club facilities, better targeting a corporate audience was also high on the agenda, alongside promoting the Club’s ongoing sizeable contributions to the community.

Our UX research didn’t just impact the sitemap + link strategy, it influenced the hierarchy of content across all pages, none more so than the homepage, with a banner news grid, swipeable result/fixture widget + tabbed news/social/TV module.

The distinct business arms of Academy (with bespoke illustrations shown above), Hospitality + Kilmarnock Community Sports Trust (KCST), were given their own unique branding to best appeal to different audiences, while internal page designs were kept simple, flexible, + modular to allow Killie FC to easily amend, restructure + add pages.

It wouldn’t be a See Saw website without the little details throughout. We animated the Hamburger menu icon to rotate into the iconic stripes of a Killie strip + added treatment to imagery throughout the site to give a punchier action feel.

OPTA partner with all Scottish League clubs to provide data feeds. From the outset of the project, we were keen to use data to build a robust match centre which we could interlink with relevant news articles to offer users the most exhaustive resource of Killie FC match information/commentary + encourage users to return regularly. However, at the time of project build OPTA data available to Killie was limited to overarching stats such as results, fixtures, line-ups + results, which powered our Homepage Result/Fixture widget.

In recent months OPTA data has opened up to offer far more detailed stats spanning match, team + player – work is already underway to build what we originally envisaged.