The Athletic is the best newsroom in sports for every major professional and college league. For a monthly subscription sports fan can access thousands of new articles every month, participate in live audio discussions with fans and writers, listen to hundreds of podcast shows, and follow every game their heart desires.

The objective of this project was to build a best in class stats & scores experience to follow every professional or college game on web, iOS, and Android. Previously, The Athletic had a boxscore experience but it lacked a lot of critical functionality, did not follow our brand standards, and was an area of the product our fans sought alternative apps for.

We looked at a number of different competitors to understand the landscape. We wanted to understand what features users would expect as table stakes and how each competitor chose to differentiate their product.

I led a session with cross-functional stakeholders to map out what users might be looking for before, during, and after a major sports event. This process gave me a great sense of where the potential opportunities could be and diverse ideas with which to get started exploring.

To give myself a game plan and get early validation from my cross functional team, I made rough wireframes depending how these features could fit together in a clear and understandable way. Through a combination of rich statistical data, real-time game modules, community interaction, and editorial insights our team was finally able to see how our product could be more compelling than anything out there in the market.

At an early stage I knew I wanted to take a modular approach this experience. For each, I explored a number of visual directions and levels of metadata to present.

When I presented the concept prototype direction to leadership, there was clear enthusiasm in the room. Though there was lots of feedback, the overall consensus was that this was the right direction to go. 
The attention quickly shifted gears towards what we could ship first.

In the concepts we explored a number of ways to differentiate our product from the competition, but to start we wanted to create a solid foundation that hit on all the basic user needs our current product was missing. With a modular approach and an iterative mindset, we knew that we could layer in the differentiation over time.

After picking out the modules we want to launch with, there was a lot more exploration we did visually to simplify and create a cohesive experience across sports. We did a lot of research into exactly what types of metadata we need to present, the interaction patterns that best match that data, and explored many visual directions. Here's where we landed at the end.