Follow football player
performances.

As a design strategist in the Innovation Lab, I developed new sports media concepts targeting Generation Z, conducting research, validating and pitching concepts to key stakeholders.

I am keeping all key insights of this project masked, generalized and edited to preserve confidentiality

Company

Sports Media

Product

Football websites/apps

My role

Design Strategist

Year

2024

Project context

The challenge was to understand Generation Z behavior - how they consume sports media, communicate, what content they prefer, their fandom behaviors, and opportunities to create new sports media concepts.

The company's current product ecosystem targets older generations, and they needed to expand their reach to Generation Z (ages 18-24).

Goal

Understand the behaviour of the Generation Z
Create new sports media concept
Validate the concept and pitch it internally in the company

DISCOVERY

Research question

How does the Generation Z consume sports media? How do they follow matches and news? How do they interact with the content in the different channels?

Football fans ages 18-24

Football fans ages 18-24 who are passionate about the sport and follow matches and news, and share content with their friends.

We conducted user interviews, desk research, and surveys.

Desk research summary showing Gen Z media consumption data

User quotes from Gen Z football fans highlighting key insights

Jobs-to-be-done framework showing underserved opportunities

1. Desk Research

We conducted an initial round of general research analyzing existing documentation from research agencies, helping us narrow down the problem space and define our subsequent research phases.

2. Conducted own research using Job-to-be-done framework

We conducted interviews with several football 'fluid' fans using the Jobs-to-be-Done framework, exploring what they wanted to achieve as fans (watch, play, learn) and which tools they currently used to fulfill these needs.

3. Finding 2 underserved opportunities

We ran a survey based on JTBD insights from interviews to quantify job importance and satisfaction with existing tools. We identified two underserved opportunities (high importance, low satisfaction) which became the starting points for our ideation process.

DESIGN PROCESS

How might we?

Create two concepts for the two underserved opportunities previously found in the research

Team brainstorming session for Gen Z sports media concepts

Concept validation framework with key metrics and testing approach

TikTok ad design and landing page concept for user acquisition testing

1. Team Brainstorming

I organized a workshop where together with different stakeholders in the company, we brainstormed solutions to address these 2 opportunities by separate.

2. Testing of the concepts

We ran small scale tests with the concepts, and validated the assumptions for both concepts.

3. TikTok ad + Painted door landing page

We created a TikTok ad and a painted door landing page to test the concepts with our target audience. The TikTok ad directed users to the landing page featuring a visual representation of the app, where they could sign up for beta access. This allowed us to collect contact details for follow-up interviews.

SOLUTIONS

Concept 1 - highlight sports app

Concept 2 - follow players app

Landing page for concept 2

INSIGHTS

Pitch a concept to a third party company

One concept was successfully pitched to a third-party company for further development and implementation.

Product feature launched in one of the comapny sites

A key feature inspired by our research was launched on one of the company's existing platforms.

Launched A/B test inspired in one of the concepts

We launched an A/B test based on one of the concepts, measuring engagement and user satisfaction.