Exploring the UFCs UX Design Strategy

Landing Page

The UFC are one of the leading global sports leagues across the MMA and combat sports world. The company acquire roughly over 7m monthly visitors to their website. However, 3.3m+ of the visitors are new visitors per month. Throughout December 2022- February 2023, the leading MMA promotion has experienced 21.19m visits. These are huge numbers for an independent organisation, and UX Design is a big factor contributing to web traffic. So, let’s waste no time and explore the UFC’s UX Design strategy.

When you land on the UFCs landing page, it shows a banner promoting the company’s next event. This demonstrates a solid understanding of typical fan behaviour. Consumers want to learn more about what’s next when one event ends.

As you can see at the bottom of the banner, they have a Timex countdown representing the amount of time left until the next event. Timex is the sponsor of the UFC fight clock, and this is a smart way to integrate enhanced UX with promoting one of their sponsors.

The banner has two tabs, one entitled read now and another entitled ‘UFC 30th anniversary’. The tab entitled would usually direct consumers to buy tickets, but the company’s UX Design team has taken a unique approach due to 30 years of the UFC. These are two behaviours strongly associated with fans, attending events and further general information relating to the backstory, narrative and where they can watch it if they’re not attending.

Site map

As you can notice at the top of the website, six tabs define their site map. Once again, these represent the features the UFC audience is most interested in. For other UX Designers or web content professionals, this is a point to take away for learning purposes. Ensure your site map is influenced by your target audience’s interests and behaviours rather than promoting the services you want them to know. That way, you’ll more likely gain traffic for longer session times. When it comes to raising awareness about particular services, you can implement that through other features such as pop-ups. 

Scrolling through the home page

When you hover over an element on the website, it expands in size ever so slightly. This meets a solid UX Design principle of enhancing consumer usability.

Furthermore, the home page is filled with news about different topics, including athletes, events and fight coverage. This enhances UX Design because time isn’t stagnant. Instead, consumers are always wanting to keep updated with the latest developments.

Language transcription

Scrolling right to the bottom of the UFC web page allows you to select a different language. As the UFC is a global organisation with a variety of different audiences, it helps allowing consumers to get content transcribed into their mother tongue.

Branding

From the colour codes to the page layout and the site map, the UFC website has a strong brand value, giving its consumers a strong sense of muscle memory whenever they’d see content published by the brand.


What UX Design principles stand out for you with the UFC?

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Published by Ash

I'm a First-Class Graduate in Sports Business Management who has worked across Local Government, Sport and the Third Sector. Throughout my career, I've developed a thriving passion to promote sport being used as a tool to bring positivity to the world we live in. This ethos has inspired me to create a website which champions this value through comprehensive online content for you to gain value from. Join me on this journey of discovering what sport can do to enhance society.

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