More Than a Player. A Live Match Experience.

Context & Goal

Users watched live football across mobile, desktop, and TV, but the experience was mostly limited to passive video consumption. Important match information, reactions, and interactive moments existed outside the player.

The goal was to turn the player into a more dynamic experience where users could follow the match, access live context, react to key moments, and engage with others without interrupting playback. I worked as the sole Product Designer, owning the end-to-end experience across devices.

Challenge

The player functioned mainly as a streaming surface. Match data, lineups, highlights, key moments, and social interactions were disconnected from the viewing experience, forcing users to leave the player or use other platforms.

The challenge was to add useful information and interaction without distracting users during high-attention moments. The experience needed to become more engaging while remaining lightweight and easy to use.

Research & Insights

We combined behavioral analysis, competitive research, and observation of highly engaged football fans. Engagement peaked around goals, penalties, dangerous attacks, substitutions, cards, and controversial decisions.

The key insight was that users naturally want to react, check context, discuss, and revisit events in real time. Interaction is most valuable when it appears at the exact moment users need it, and match data is more useful when it stays connected to the live viewing context.

This shifted the design direction from improving a video player to creating a shared, real-time experience layer around the match.

Solution

The player became the central hub of the live football experience. We simplified the visual hierarchy to keep the match at the center, then introduced contextual layers around it:

• A smart sidebar for live stats, lineups, highlights, and key moments
• A spoiler-safe key-moments feature for quickly revisiting important events
• Real-time questions and predictions to encourage active participation
• Live chat for reactions and discussion
• Device-specific layouts across mobile, desktop, and TV

The result was a more connected viewing flow where users could watch, explore, react, and participate without leaving the player.

Impact & Results

The redesign evolved the player from a passive streaming tool into a live interactive experience hub.

It was designed to support longer watch time, deeper in-match engagement, more frequent interaction during important moments, better access to match information, stronger social participation, and new user sign-ups.

Post-launch user feedback showed a positive response to the added match information and key-moment features. Exact product metrics were not available for publication, so the work should be understood as a foundation for measuring feature adoption, viewing behavior, and return rate in future iterations.

Summary

By bringing information, interaction, and social participation into the player, the redesign made live football feel less like a video stream and more like a shared experience.