Building a home for football fans

Before the app, Gloria published match updates, player news and transfer stories every day. The team knew which posts fans reacted to. The next step was a product fans would come back to on their own, and I joined to lead its design.

I owned design for the company. I worked directly with the founder and the head of product on what we should build, led design for the launch product and the brand, and hired the design team. From the start, I wanted fans involved in what we built.

I’ve followed Barcelona for most of my life, and I knew how much of being a fan happens in the company of other fans. The open question was which part of that a product should hold. Our early conversations with fans suggested several plausible answers, so I built prototypes to give the team and fans something concrete to respond to.

There were four. Match updates gave fans live news about their club. Matchday trivia let them compete on what they knew. Spotlight captured and shared moments from the game, and matchday rooms gave fans of one team a place to spend the match together.

We took each one back to fans and built several iterations. The ones that held their attention were organised around a club. Match information gave people a reason to arrive, and news and conversation kept the community active between games. We narrowed the four prototypes into three experiences for the launch product, and I led the design of each. The club feed brought news and discussion together for each team, Matchday Live followed every part of a match, and watch parties gave fans a room to spend the game together.

We shipped the club feed first. Each fan followed a feed for their club, with news curated by community managers who also moderated the discussion beneath each post. It took the kind of content Gloria’s audience already followed on social, organised it around a club and opened it to conversation, so the community had somewhere to gather from the first release.

We started go-to-market work on the feed while I continued designing Matchday Live and watch parties. OneFootball acquired Gloria in September 2022.

The team had a good sense of what fans engaged with on social and much less sense of why. I framed and planned our research, coached teammates to run interviews themselves and introduced the tools we used. Together we spoke with over 40 fans and community managers about the place their club held in their lives and the different ways they followed and discussed the game. The team then ran its own conversations with fans as we tested each prototype.

As the app took shape, I introduced a design system for the mobile build. Engineers built screens from shared components, which sped up the build and kept the experience consistent as we added the matchday features.

Gloria’s logo had been made for social posts. The app put it in new places, from a small community avatar to the app icon. Over six months I worked with the founder and the head of product to build the logo into a brand that could carry the product and its marketing, with a typeface, a colour palette and a direction for imagery and messaging.

I tested several typefaces and colour combinations before choosing Boing as the brand type, then adjusted the mark to sit with it.