Overview:

Turner needed March Madness Live adapted for Windows 10 Universal on a deadline that could not move. The tournament was coming whether the product was ready or not. I helped translate the existing March Madness Live ecosystem into a Microsoft platform experience across phone and tablet views, covering navigation, Watch, scores, teams, Game Center, video playback, TV provider states, and responsive platform behavior.

Challenge:

In December 2015, Turner Media decided to expand its March Madness app suite onto the Windows Universal platform, encouraged by Microsoft as part of a broader effort to grow the Windows Phone user base. The timeline for design and development was short, but the team was excited to take on a new platform and a new challenge.

This was event-driven product work with no soft landing. The experience had to feel consistent with the broader March Madness Live ecosystem, but it also had to respect Windows Universal patterns, device behavior, effective pixels, adaptive layouts, input models, navigation panes, pivots, content display rules, and Microsoft expectations. Any ambiguity left in the design would become a schedule risk almost immediately because the tournament date was not moving.

The product also had to support a dense live-sports experience on a platform our team was still learning. Fans needed access to live games, scores, teams, brackets, picks, notifications, video, VOD, provider login, channel lookup, FAQs, social content, and game-specific states. Those features had to work across handset and tablet views without turning into a copied-and-pasted version of another platform.

Solution:

When the timeline is short, a well-organized kickoff becomes one of the most important design tools. Once the decision was made to move forward, a team of design and technical leads traveled to the client's offices to plan the MVP and create a strategy for how the work could be accomplished.

Because Turner already had an existing suite of March Madness apps, the new Windows Universal experience could not feel separate from what fans were used to. After planning, I reviewed Microsoft documentation to understand the platform guardrails and how Windows Universal handled device families, effective pixels, platform scaling, smart input, responsive structure, navigation, command behavior, media controls, and live tile considerations. Similar to responsive web design, the device primer system and logical breakpoints had to be considered during the UX flow and wireframe phases.

I created the navigation and UI design work as a set of focused presentation packages so the team could move quickly and make decisions in chunks. The work covered persistent menu behavior, vertical and horizontal scrolling, pivot breaks, Watch sections, scores layouts, game-state tiles, Game Center states, team lists, video player controls, live and VOD states, provider selection, and smallest-handset viewable-area constraints.

Once the navigation flow and display logic were approved, we applied the established March Madness branding to the Windows Universal experience. Since the platform relied heavily on vector elements, we built existing assets into a custom typeface for the development team rather than following a traditional icon production path. I stayed closely involved throughout development, providing interaction notes, breakpoint logic, responsive guidance, primer display support, adjusted designs, and schedule review as the larger app suite moved toward release.

Result:

The team shipped a unified March Madness Live experience for Windows Universal in time for the 2016 tournament, giving fans another way to follow the event on their preferred platform. The work exceeded client expectations, especially given the short timeline and the learning curve of a new platform.

The takeaways from the project gave our team new expertise and helped us approach a new client base with more confidence. The work also showed that the team could absorb a new platform, preserve the identity of a major live-sports product, and still produce the practical documentation development needed to hit an immovable event date. As a final added benefit, Turner Media engaged us again the following year to design the March Madness experience for Xbox, further strengthening the relationship and our reputation as a product partner.

Highlights:

The deadline pressure defined the work, but it did not become an excuse for careless execution. Projects like this can easily encourage shortcuts because the calendar is immovable and the release window is unforgiving. The biggest highlight was seeing the team learn, adapt, and execute on a new platform while still holding the quality bar.

Together, we created a new design and development process, adhered to Microsoft's guidelines, and expanded the team's knowledge base under real pressure. Every new lesson or system learned adds to professional expertise, and this project carried that satisfaction clearly. It was a job well done because it shipped, but also because the team came out of it sharper than when we started.

One of my favorite parts was how quickly the work moved from platform research into concrete product decisions. The UWP documentation could have stayed abstract, but the job was to convert that guidance into screens Turner could approve and developers could build. Scores, Watch, teams, Game Center, and video were not theoretical modules. They were the tournament experience, and they had to survive real sports content.