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Sports Innovation Lab
A data driven app for the business of sports
Can you name America’s national pastime? It used to be an easy answer: baseball. But today it’s harder to say. Maybe Fortnite? Netflix? Welcome to the new age of sports, where traditional powerhouses must compete with endless entertainment options. The Yankees, Red Sox, and other sports businesses are asking themselves: How do we stay on top?
Enter Sports Innovation Lab. They develop digital tools that analyze emerging technologies and forecast how they’ll shape the future of sports. It’s market research, reinvented. Together, we built an app that delivers personalized, data-driven insights — all in a pretty purple package.
01
Extending the brand for digital
Our team used Sports Innovation Lab’s base brand as a jumping off point for a new digital design system. We freshened up the type palette, played up the deep purple, and applied the existing brand’s strong angles and dynamic patterns. Most importantly, we designed a system crafted specifically for screens.
02
Connecting the ecosystem
The app is interconnected and intended for exploration. News, Profiles, and Scoreboards all push to one another, so each click drives the user to a deeper understanding.
The personalized news feed calls out the key players involved in each story, making it easy to dive into current competitors and potential partners.
Heat maps help identify market opportunities by highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each company compared to its competitive set.
Scoreboards go a step further, ranking companies head-to-head so they can see where they stack up — and how they might catch up.
03
Scaling the experience for any device
The typical Sports Innovation Lab customer is always on the move. Catch a flight to the game one day. Hustle across the country for a meeting with Nike the next. No matter the device, they’ll experience a feature-rich interface with charts that scale down seamlessly to provide the same powerful data and insights at any screen size.
04
Increasing engagement through personalization
The app provides value from first login and gets smarter from there, learning from the user and serving up personalized insights. But it’s not just about machine-learning, algorithms, and other of-the-moment technologies. Personalization also comes with a human touch. Sports Innovation Lab has amazing analysts. We made their personalities (and insights) features of the app.
Notifications
Feeds Saved
Activities Trusted
Insights
05
Future-proofing the architecture
The existing app was functional, but as we re-imagined what it could do, it only made sense to re-think the architecture as well. To aid in technical discovery, we devised and facilitated various workshop activities. This process enabled us to download the learnings from the existing app and apply them to the next iteration. In the end, we built a snappy, React app for the client leveraging Netlify Lambdas, Algolia, and Stream. And for the developers out there, we are in the process of open-sourcing a project for React Router.
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Technical Discovery
Learn how Engineers at Upstatement use design thinking to create & facilitate workshop activities that aid in technical discovery.
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React Router Guards
Coming soon, a middleware API for React Router that enables you to perform complex logic between the call for navigation and the final render of a route.
06
Crafting a vision for what’s next
What we built is just the beginning. During the research and strategy phase, we dreamed big, designing features that go well beyond the MVP shown here. We envisioned charts that could be manipulated by time controls and more robust methods for curation and engagement. These ideas all contributed to a grand vision that will continue to inspire the team and give them a roadmap for the next phase of development.
