Project Overview

Athletes Unlimited is a female professional sports league that flips the traditional model: athletes teams change weekly, and fans have a direct impact on scoring and engagement. For this project, our challenge was to imagine an innovative direction for the brand five plus years into the future.

Through interviews, typology-building, and trend research, our team discovered that fans, especially Gen Z, value the community and rituals around sports watching as much as the games themselves. That insight led us to design Beat Em’, a hype-tracking digital fan hub that transforms the energy of watching into shareable, gamified memories. Think Strava meets Spotify Wrapped—but for sports fans.

‍Objectives

• Envision how Athletes Unlimited could evolve in 5 years by blending tech, fandom, and community.
• Explore emerging trends—sports betting, personalization, social media use—and translate them into opportunities.
• Create a solution that highlights the social, communal side of fandom rather than just passive viewership.

‍Step-by-step process

• Trend scanning → Researched shifts in sports engagement, from the rise of sports betting to the booming sports tech market and Gen Z’s reliance on second screens.
• Interviews & typologies → Spoke with 9 sports fans and identified distinct fan types (Fans of the Culture, the Sport, the Team, the Athlete), honing in on the “cultural fans” who value the social aspects most.
• Insights & pain points → Learned that fans craved proof of their passion, ways to relive emotional memories, and rituals that made fandom feel more personal.
• Ideation → Brainstormed multiple concepts (leaderboards, biometric trackers, fan points) before converging on the “hype-tracking” idea.
• Concept development → Designed Beat Em’, a socially oriented app that logs what games you watch, where and who you watch with, and how hyped you got—turning those moments into shareable content and bragging rights.‍
• Validation → Tested the concept against emotional requirements: it had to feel personal, frictionless, ritualistic, and open.

story Board

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