Creating the best matchday experience for football fans online
Building a thriving community product is one of the more complicated things to execute right. In my opinion, it is akin to catching lightning in a bottle — possible but challenging. At Gloria, our vision was to create the most connected & engaged digital football communities for fans worldwide. The intent was to begin by making the best match day experience for football fans.
Football is the most followed sport on earth. With a following of 5 billion fans worldwide and 120,000 viewers weekly across top leagues in Europe, the average football fan would spend 3,000 hours watching football matches in their lifetime and another 3,500 hours discussing the game with other fans. People refer to football as a religion and are not far off.
Like religion, football fans are passionate about the game and have a deep sense of belonging with their clubs and other fans. They feel profound both in the cases of triumphs and defeats. I worked with the team at Gloria as a designer to lead their efforts to launch a community offering for football fans. In my role:
I enabled research that allowed us to articulate user needs, behaviours and motivations better.
I leveraged prototyping to help translate these insights into opportunities the team could validate.
I introduced a design system that was vital in speeding up the implementation of our mobile app.
I refined the brand's identity, creating a system that could support product and marketing initiatives.
Generative user research
As a football fan and long-time supporter of FC Barcelona, I'm familiar with the deep feelings and shared sense of community that comes from following the sport. In short, football fandom was an excellent fit for a community offering. However, to figure out how the community might manifest and what interactions to enable, the team at Gloria needed a deeper understanding of football fans.
Before focusing on its product, Gloria had built a brand on Instagram and Twitter, serving 300,000 football fans content daily. Content like match updates, player updates and transfer news for top European teams formed a big part of their programming. Gloria's experience serving football content to fans meant the team had a good sense of what fans found engaging; however, this "sense" was insufficient to inform product and design decisions as the team lacked insights about fans' motivations for engaging or what specific jobs they were trying to get done.
My approach was to build on our existing knowledge and relationships and move the team towards a world where fans did more than consume and engage with our content. Since speed was a non-negotiable for our stage, the intent was to embed fans in our product development process to empower the team to build confidence as they made decisions. My focus was to:
Help properly frame and plan our research initiatives
Help team members get better at conducting research
Help introduce the right tools in a way that sets us up for success
While working with the team, we spoke to over 40 fans and community managers, building a rich understanding of football fans' sense of self, engagement modes and preferences, and underlying motivations.
Translating insights into opportunities with prototypes
With a better understanding of what made fans tick, the team moved to ideation, where the main objective was to uncover the shape our community product would take. I helped the team think through different directions by developing multiple prototypes, each attempting to create a new or better experience for existing fan behaviours. Some of the prototypes I explored covered:
Match updates: An experience for fans to get real-time updates for their favourite teams.
Matchday trivia: An experience for fans to flex their football knowledge and compete with other fans.
Spotlight: An experience for creating and capturing matchday moments
Matchday rooms: A virtual space for fans of specific teams to chat and bond over their passions.
Importantly, the team leveraged these prototypes to have conversations with football fans to discover what resonated and what did not. After building multiple iterations of the fan offering, we learned that the most significant opportunity lies in developing engaging online vertical communities for football fans, where fans can:
Derive utility: Live the matchday experience and follow the game online
Share knowledge: Consume relevant news and opinions
Foster community: Discuss results, players and news with fellow fans
The entire process culminated in three core experiences for our launch product, which I helped to craft.
Team feed
Team-specific feeds that fans can consume and discuss. Community managers curate content and moderate the ensuing discussions.
Matchday Live
A live score experience that fans can use to follow all parts of a football match, from lineups and injuries to stats and player ratings.
Watch parties
Scheduled rooms where users can hang out with fellow fans before, during and after the game. Fans will join limited-capacity rooms to chat, react to player performance and events, and discuss match-related topics.
Branding: More Than Just a Logo
Gloria already had a logo used in social media posts and brand collateral. Over the course of six months, I collaborated with Victoire (our founder) and Marc (our head of product) to create a system for the brand. Here, the focus was on introducing elements like a brand type, figuring out our colours, approach to imagery and messaging.
The process was very iterative, where I explored different directions, testing out various typefaces and colour combinations before ultimately settling on Boing as our primary brand type. I needed to adjust the mark to fit the brand type better and ensure the resulting logo could work in various settings — website, app icon, social posts, etc.
Conclusion
My time at Gloria was incredible. Given my love for football, I enjoyed working on a product I could deeply connect with. I loved the challenges of deciphering what would make for a tremendous community offering, especially doing so alongside incredible teammates. We launched the team feed feature and began go-to-market efforts while building out the other vital features.
Gloria was in the process of raising money but was ultimately acquired by OneFootball in September 2022.