Reducing creation time of referee eligibility by 50X

ArbiterSports had built 7 disparate products across nearly 30 years — each with its own brand, navigation, and login — and customers were starting to defect to competitors after years of loyalty. Nearly half of all support traffic traced back to eligibility & registration alone. I was hired to redesign the UI, but quickly realized the information architecture was the foundational problem.

I designed a phased migration that fixed the IA before the UI: standardized navigation across all 7 legacy products, then rebuilt eligibility & registration as the pilot — running contextual inquiry, a 1,000-user hybrid card sort, and an affinity-mapping session that aligned every department on a single user-based information architecture. The launch became the company's most successful, retained 1,200+ schools, and directly enabled the 2nd-biggest deal it had ever signed.