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 goal of this work was to paint a north star as to the types of interactive, engaging, and viral experiences we could create around major sports moments like the NBA Draft or The Olympics. Historically, The Athletic had relied heavily on long-form journalism and investigative reporting to capture fans during sports moments but had no additional product footprint.

I organized and conducted a workshop with my design team to understand the user needs for sports moments and generate ideas as to the types of experiences we could create. By using the structure of a timeline I was able to understand opportunities holistically across the user journey.

Since this was a visioning exercise, we knew we wanted to break out of our existing design system and create new visual patterns. Creating one mood board each for the events that we were aiming to illustrate helped us find new patterns and visual experiments to try.

We focused this exploration on ways to understand and get value about the NFL Draft quickly. In our current product users have to read, often a lot, in order to derive insights on sports moments. We did this by creating interactive data visualization, digestible card lists, video highlights, and collections of content.

My team's second exploration was focused on how we could combine expert insights with community elements like chat, polls, or user generated content. This exploration also had a heavier slant towards data visualization and visual summaries of information. Lastly, we explored how we could leverage this type of surface for sponsorship opportunities.