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Savannah Ghost Pirates: Website Redesign
Role
UX Designer
Timeframe
10 Weeks
Tools
Figma, Miro, UXR, Testing
Team
5 Members
Challenge
The Savannah Ghost Pirates, a local hockey team, had a website that wasn't serving their community effectively. Fans and potential attendees struggled to find basic information like game schedules, ticket purchases, and player details due to poor navigation and cluttered design.
Solution
Guided by user research, testing, and continuous iteration, we redesigned the Ghost Pirates website to address core navigation issues and information overload. The refined experience prioritizes fan engagement through easy access to essential information, schedules, tickets, player details, while introducing interactive features like player cards and community events. This created an intuitive platform that strengthens the connection between the team and Savannah's hockey community.
Process
1
2
3
4
5
Research
Synthesis
Structure
Design
Solution
Understand
User Persona
Existing Sitemap
Low-Fi Designs
Final Designs
Comp Analysis
Key Features
Card Sorting
User Testing
Reflection
Interviews
New Sitemap
Research
Understand
Before conducting formal research, our team performed a collaborative walkthrough of the existing Ghost Pirates website, documenting key pain points and usability issues.
🧭 Navigation
Cluttered submenus with too many tabs hurts navigation.
🗃️ Organization
Poor organization of menu items throughout the site creates confusion.
🎨 Visual Design
Poor visual design combined with information overload creates a cluttered experience.
Research
Competitor Analysis
To better understand how similar organizations approached these challenges, we conducted a competitive analysis. We examined how other sports teams were addressing navigation, organization, and visual design.
The Savannah Bananas are a theatrical baseball team based in Savannah.
+ Strengths
-
Engaging design
-
Easy navigation
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Mobile friendly
- Weaknesses
-
Few interactive features
Savannah Bananas
Atlanta Gladiators
The Atlanta Gladiators are a professional minor league hockey team based in Duluth, Georgia.
+ Strengths
-
Clean
-
Good organization
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Emphasizes events
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Good visual design
- Weaknesses
-
Less focus on fans
-
Few interactive features
Research
Interviews
Having seen how other sports teams approached these challenges, we turned to user interviews to understand the specific needs of Ghost Pirates fans.
Key Quotes
👤- “The website is extremely overwhelming. It was definitely cluttered, and hard to navigate.”
👤 - “There is simply too much going on, and it is easy for someone to get miss information or just get lost in the website.”
👤 - “They have a good opportunity to add theme nights and tailgates and special events to be a good outlet for the community.”
👤 - “I have been frustrated because of third party ticket sellers and the reliability of those sites.”
👤 - “Showing the team playing together and as a community makes them seem more likable, friendly, and approachable.”
Synthesis
User Persona
We synthesized insights from both our competitive analysis and user interviews to create a persona that represented our primary user
Synthesis
Key Features
We prioritized five key features that addressed our persona's key needs while incorporating successful solutions from our competitive analysis and common pain points from user interviews.
📆 Scheduling
A detailed, easily accessible, and interactive season schedule.
ℹ️ Team Info
A place to learn about the players and coaches, with interactive features like player cards.
🎟️ Tickets
A built in ticketing system, easily accessible from anywhere on the site
👨👩👦👦 Community
Community inclusion throughout, promotion of events or an interactive calendar.
🏒 Matchroom
A place to see highlights, stats and scores for ongoing or past matches.
Structure
Existing Sitemap
The next step before starting our design was to establish a proper, well-organized site navigation and rework the information architecture. We began by building a sitemap of the existing site to understand the current structure and identify organizational issues.
Structure
Card Sorting
With the existing sitemap documented, we turned to our users again, conducting an unmoderated card sorting exercise. We presented users with all the menu items from the current site and asked them to organize these items into five predetermined categories: tickets, team, community, schedule, and shop. The results revealed clear patterns in how users expected information to be grouped.
This was how our participants sorted the items:
Structure
New Sitemap
Using the card sorting results, we reorganized the sitemap and navigation structure to create more logical groupings and improve overall site navigation. This new sitemap became the foundation for our entire redesign structure.
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Design
Low-Fi Designs
From this point, we applied our research and testing insights to develop design solutions. We started with rough, low-fidelity wireframes and prototypes.
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User Testing
We tested our low-fidelity prototypes through A/B testing and usability sessions to validate key design decisions and interactions. These insights informed our final redesign.
Solution
Final Designs
- Page 2
Solution
Reflection
My Impact
During this project, I served as a UX designer with additional responsibilities in user research. I helped conduct initial user interviews and facilitated A/B testing and usability sessions throughout the process. My primary contributions focused on prototyping and visual design, particularly developing key homepage features like the community events carousel and matchup section. As a highly collaborative project, all team members contributed across different areas, allowing for diverse input and shared ownership of the final solution.
Looking Back
This project had the biggest impact on me as both a designer and student. It was the first time I had to integrate all the skills I'd developed primary and secondary research, research analysis, user testing, wireframing, prototyping, and visual design, into one comprehensive assignment. Having to coordinate these different disciplines gave me a deeper understanding of how each phase informs the next, and how user insights should drive every design decision. I was able to develop and refine a wide range of skills during this project, but more importantly, I learned how to think systematically about design problems. It's why this project continues to influence how I approach new challenges today.
Awards and Recognition
I'm proud to share that our professor submitted this project to the 2025 Indigo Design Awards, where we received gold in interaction design and silver in branding graphic design, website design, and branding for sports. Seeing our work recognized at this level reinforced my belief in the power of user research and collaborative design to create meaningful solutions.
View here: Savannah Ghost Pirates (website redesign) Indigo Award winner 2025
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