Last Updated: January 2025
Olympic Village
Uni Project
Role
User Researcher
Product Designer
Timeline
June - November 2024
Team
Myself and two other design students
Skills
Research and Development, HCI Design, Prototyping, Visual Design
As Olympic viewership declines among younger audiences, it’s crucial to reimagine how these historic events are experienced. By fostering a sense of community, introducing interactive elements that encourage participation, and adapting storytelling to align with changing viewing habits, the Games can become more immersive, engaging, and relevant for the next generation.
Project Overview
In class, we were tasked with creating a hypothetical digital, multi-modal interface within the realm of the Olympics (pretty fitting for the year of 2024). We researched the declining viewership rates within younger demographics, and how we can empathise with them.
We delved into the innate desire for human connection, longing to feel like an active participant, and the value of short-high impact content, as avenues to increase engagement with the Olympics
Our goal was to create an interface that felt fun, intuitive, and socially relevant, appealing to digital-native users. However, as a team with limited experience in game design, we found ourselves overwhelmed with the volume of creative possibilities. Due to our disproportionate focus on the usability of the interface, we unintentionally neglected the system aspect of the game, failing to narrow in on a clear cohesive direction, and implementing exciting, but unnecessary ideas.
How could we balance our ambition while staying within realistic boundaries that serve usability with our design?
Through iterative testing and team discussion, we learned to embrace simplicity and focus more on the core elements of the game that genuinely enhanced user engagement. In future, scrapping overly complex/ambiguous features would have allowed us to streamline our development process, and better prioritise, clarity, accessibility, and user flow. This experience taught us the importance of restraint and intentionality in design, especially when exploring unfamiliar domains such as game design.
What I learned
Our Process
From start to end date our journey involved a non-linear - sometimes frustrating, deeply involved, UX exploration, iterative design and rigorous testing stages
Problem Area
The Olympics - to me - is a celebration of incredible acts of perseverance, unity, and camaraderie. And transcending international competition, connects people across cultures, showing that despite our differences, the Olympics has the power to bring us together through shared moments of passion, determination, and human achievement.
However, after researching various news articles, literary papers, and drawing on personal experiences, we uncovered a convincing argument that there was a decline in viewership, particularly relevant in younger demographics.
We found that Gen Z were more likely to choose a social media site before choosing to watch the Olympics live, it’s traditional viewing medium.
Tokyo Olympic Games (2021) down
↓ 15 Million viewers
From last years games
(Statista, 2022)
Research
We triangulated both secondary and primary research methods, and after discussion identified several research questions to guide our line of inquiry. We then created a rigorous and interrogative research plan.
Secondary Research
Online Ethnography
<50 data fragments
Competitor Analysis
a) Instagram, b) Youtube, c) Twitter, d) TikTok
Primary Research
Surveys
<20 respondents
Semi-structured Interviews
20min interviews with 10> interviewees
Contextual Observations
3 <1 hour sessions
Our Research Methods Mapped
We made sure we triangulated our data not only across varying cultural differences and ages, but also with what type of research methods we used.
In the Wild (Natural)
Lab Based
Observational
Attitudinal
Online Ethnography
Contextual Observation
Surveys
Interviews
Interrogating our Data
We sorted data fragments (bits from interviews, recorded observations, notes from online ethnographies etc.) into groups to uncover commonalities. We then found grouped these low-level insights together to generate our key insights which are covered in the following section.
175 Data Fragments
15 Low-level Themes
5 Key Insights
Note: As linear as this process seems, it took us 5+ hours of rigorous interrogation and discussion. We ensured that the low-level themes emerged organically from the data groupings, rather than forcing data fragments to fit predefined categories.
What did we find out?
Through triangulation and analysis using the inductive process of affinity diagramming with the data we had collected, we were able to uncover the following insights
1
Enabling viewers to forge interpersonal connections with the athletes leads to higher engagement with the Olympics.
We found that the more connected viewers feel to the athletes, the more inclined to watch the Olympics they became. This was shown particularly in our online ethnography; That the most highly interacted with content was of the athlete's back stories and personal lives.
Olympics viewers enjoy the relationships between the participating athletes, particularly in a humorous context. This personalises the athletes and connects them to audiences
2
Leveraging the social nature of humans by emphasising the communal experience of watching the Olympics, fosters a sense of belonging and unity.
The social aspect of watching the Olympics is really important to viewers, as it allows them to cultivate a sense of community. We found that social influence was multifaceted; It involved not only direct communities such as families and friends, but also online communities, which was evidenced in the engagement of commenters in our online ethnography. We also discovered a positive correlation with online engagement, and strength of sense of belonging.
3
Short, high-impact content is the best way to resonate with young people and keep them engaged
We found that short-form content is the best way for us to reach our demographic to watch the Olympics. There was a huge response rate in favour of short-form media content and information found on social media sites. We also discovered that participants in our contextual observations had shorter attention spans and would go on their phones frequently during long segments of commentary.
10
8
6
4
2
0
Viral Videos
Shared Interest with Friends
Interest in Sporting
Event
Family
Memes
Community
4
Young audiences value the ability to be an active participant of an authentic experience
Younger audiences value the ability to feel like they are part of something real when they watch the Olympics. It is of utmost importance that our design concept must be genuine, authentic and actually involve people in some way as opposed to passive viewership. By having people feel as if they a their part in an experience that transcends purely just watching the Olympics on a screen, it can increase engagement and emotional investment.
Contextual Observation
Participants were seen to ‘place bets’ on who would win in one of the games. This shows that allowing viewers to be involved, or feel like they are part of something that is ‘real’ garners engagement.
5
More opportunity exists within showing incredible feats of athleticism, rather than displaying values of patriotism
We found that there was a (surprising) lack of patriotism from young viewers. Some even expressed their frustration with the lack of representation of other countries on 9Now. It is important for viewing platforms to balance an increasingly multicultural demographic of watchers with country pride. With the increase of social media and cross-cultural interconnectivity, it is evident that showing incredible feats of athleticism, regardless of country transcends country pride and patriotism.
Shifting Perspectives
After identifying what our target demographic needs, we shifted our focus from why, to how
Why?
‘Why are young viewers deterred from watching the Olympics on traditional viewing platforms such as live streams and long-form content?’
How?
‘How can we increase the viewership of the Olympics amongst young audiences?’
Problem Statement
“In the recent years of short-form content taking over the internet, live viewership of the Olympics has seen a decline of engagement from young people, despite their interests in sports. Young viewers prefer seeing short, high-impact content, as well as funny moments from the events that allows them to create a talking point with their social circles and feel a sense of connection with athletes.”
Meet our Users
Storyboarding
Visualising and articulating the frustrations faced by our target demographic helped to centre their needs and desires in our ideation process.
User Journey Map
We articulated our users' experience with watching the Olympics, illustrating the dynamic evolution of experiences from initial motivations, disengagement, engagement points, and then post-watching experiences, ensuring to target pain points at all stages of their viewing.
Phases
Awareness
Experiencing
Disengaging at points of lesser interest
Engaging at points of peak interest
Discussion
Rest
Actions
Thoughts and Feelings
Pain Points
The user sees a viral TikTok, flicks through TV channels, and invites family to watch live bouldering.
Bored by complex commentary, the user chats with family and treats the TV as background noise.
Unfamiliar athletes competing lead the user to disengage and scroll on their phone.
The crowd’s excitement draws the user back in, prompting them to search for the athlete online, becoming actively engaged.
The family chats about the standout climber, but as the next athlete struggles, the user gets distracted again—until a conversation about a viral moment with the Turkish shooter prompts them to look it up online.
As the family heads to bed, the user opens TikTok to watch bouldering highlights, sharing standout moments with friends.
After a long day, the user struggles to stay focused, frequently zoning out.
The user’s boredom grows due to a lack of connection with the unfamiliar athletes on screen.
The user feels disengaged due to a lack of connection with the sport and athletes, and frustrated by how hard it is to find context or highlights for viral Olympic moments mentioned by others.
“I think it would be so much fun to watch this sport with other people”
“I don’t have the mental energy to concentrate on what the commentators are saying”
This competitor is not very good. He doesn’t seem very significant
“That’s insane. Can you
imagine the training that
goes into being able to
do that? Incredible!”
“What are you guys talking about? How have I not heard about this!”
“How did I miss these
moments? I was watching it live!”
Concept
We began our ideation processes by generating several concepts individually based on the previous research. We used Crazy 8s, Mindmapping, sketching, and brainstorming in this process, which culminated into the following 3 ideas.
Decision Making
Inspired by the benefits of gamification — and the spirit of the Olympics as a game that perhaps viewers can participate in alongside the athletes — we looked to popular community-driven, card-trading games like Pokémon Go and the Premier League for inspiration.
The concept we decided upon was a culmination of the My Olympics App and Athlete Kiosks, combining successful features from both ideas to create an effective concept that hits all of our insights. We also wanted to incorporate a card-trading aspect:
Card collecting and trading creates a sense of community through friendly competition and gamifies the exploration of Olympic related content, fostering a sense of belonging and unity through shared interest for incredible feats of athleticism in an interactive short form and high-impact way.
Concept Features
1
Kiosks will be located in highly frequented public spaces, with each kiosk displaying interesting information about relevant Olympic athlete
2
Users can 'collect the profile' using their smartphone app: "Olympic Village", where it will be saved as a digital trading card
3
Users can curate a 'team' using their collected cards, and receive live notifications, updating them on the performance of these athletes during the Olympics
4
These cards can be traded with other players
5
There will be an integrated 'highlights' feature that allows users to scroll through short-form content related to their collected cards
Prototyping
Our design process often jumped back and forth in fidelities based on user-feedback. However, our general process starts with the initial development of our core concept and progresses to several rounds of user-testing at a range of fidelities.
Game Design
As our team was entirely unfamiliar with the process of game design, we researched and sought out a criteria of features included in games through utilising game design templates made by experts. This allowed us to narrow our design process, assisting us in setting necessary boundaries and defining our essential features in order to prevent us from spiralling down a rabbit hole of what ifs.
*Criteria list adapted from CGSpectrum
Navigation Map
Following this stage, we then created a navigation map which allowed us to visualise the flow of the interface and what functions each screen needed to include
Sketching
Using the navigation map, we started sketching the respective screens necessary, allowing us to define the main functions of each of the screens potential layouts and any annotations needed to describe the intended user interactions
Collaboratively, we iteratively annotated, made corrections and noted key points and interactions about each page.
Wireframing
These models were used to evaluate the functionality of our designs through preliminary usability testing, ensuring we got the fundamental structure right the first time round, saving us time later on.
To test our wireframes, we used the following research methods:
Making Changes
Refinements were made to our wireframes throughout the usability testing process leading up to the development of our hi-fidelity prototypes. The key issues we found can all be traced back the four following categories:
1
Effectiveness and Usability
2
Utility and Learnability
3
Utility and Effectiveness
4
Safety and Effectiveness
Effectiveness and Usability
Utility and Learnability
Utility and Effectiveness
Safety and Effectiveness
Mid-Fidelity Prototype
We refined the visual design by transitioning low-fi concepts into mid-fi prototypes, a phase marked by numerous iterative adjustments aimed at enhancing fidelity and clarity in preparation for the final high-fi implementation. Our first step was to decide on colour scheme and general style.
Visual Style
We wanted the overall style to attract younger demographics, so we took to the popular sports brand Nike and various other apps with a similar bold, and impactful style. We took inspiration from these images to decide on our font and colour palette.
Some images from our ideation and moodboarding
UI Font
Futura: Display
Heading Large
Heading Medium
Body Text
Body Emphasis
Card Names
Colour Palette
The colours we selected featured the gold and blue from the official olympic brand guidelines seen below, along with white and some shades of navy of varying Opacities, to be visually appealing to a younger generation with its bold colours, while tying back its connection to the olympics.
Hex: 25235C
Hex: 9F8F5E
Hex: 0078D0
*Screenshots from the official Olympic Brand Guidelines 2025
Button Design
Action
Navigation
Disabled
Confirm Trade
Unselected/Cancel Action
Blue = Action
Gold = Navigation
Grey = Disabled
Transparent = Unselected/Cancel Action
Centering Usability
In order to ensure our UI aligns with each usability goal, we thought it best to conduct testing with 'experts'; Fellow designers that understood usability heuristics - a set of high level guidelines based on an understanding of human behaviour, psychology and information processing. We will be using Jakob Nielsen's 10 Usability Heuristics, to assess the usability of our screens across several tasks.
We found that after spending countless days and nights putting our prototype together, we found it difficult to step away and understand whether our prototype was actually usable. Therefore, expert testing allowed us a fresh perspective on usability problems we might not have been aware of, in a way that is communicated by and understood from another designer's perspective, one who is conscious of the factors that make a 'good' design 'good'.
2 Participants per Session
3 sessions >1.5 hour duration
6 Participants Total
It was important that the testing was done collaboratively, because the discussion and decision making processes undertook between participants formed the crux of our testing. This discourse allowed us deeper insight into cognitive processes, and provided context behind each of the recommendations. Furthermore, collaboration allowed space for disagreements or encouragement, which also allowed us to discern the severity of the problem.
Individual and Collaborative Heuristic Evaluation Template created by me :)
Analysis + Synthesis
As a group, we introduced each point of recommendation given during the heuristic evaluation session. We decided - based on given severity rating and relevance to the needs and desires of our users and reoccurrence of the recommendation- it's priority rating from Low, Medium, to High.
So much feedback but not enough time!
As we had an overwhelming amount of feedback and recommendations and a limited amount of time, it was important that we prioritised and completed the most severe problems such as core functionality and interactions, and then - given we have the time - complete the lesser important issues later, such as refinements of more cosmetic/display features.
Delegation of Tasks
We then assigned each task on the priority list to a group member based on our interests and strengths.
Some of the significant changes I was tasked with were:
Iterations
Redesigning of the Athlete Player Cards (APCs)
The Visual display of digital cards can be altered to better adhere to the motif of physical trading cards in order to improve the match between system and the real world.
This would consequently improve other factors of heuristics such as recognition, aesthetics and efficiency.
Using Simone Biles as the athlete for our initial card design, we worked various iterations until we found one that was:
a) Easily recognisable as a physical card
b) Included relevant statistics
We learned that as designers, sometimes we get too caught up in the details that we miss the obvious:
“They don’t really look like cards, more like a thumbnail”
Front Side Ideation
!
Back Side Ideation
Final Design
We validated the usability of these cards with subsequent testing with a different group of participants during think-aloud, all of whom reported that these did in-fact look like cards. Yay!
We found that the top bar was not intuitive to users; The separation of seemingly random features from the top and the bottom bar was confusing to users and hindered their ability to effectively navigate throughout the app.
One of our experts stated:
“The navigation bar is some of the most valuable space on the whole screen; Should be more important than the other buttons on screen, and should be defined like that”
Top Navigation Bar (pre-iteration)
Bottom Navigation Bar (pre-iteration)
Creating a Notification page
Home Page Before
Home Page After
Final Concept:
Olympic Village
Why just follow the Games when you can collect, compete, and trade your way through them?
Collect cards from city kiosks and build a team that evolves with every event. As athletes chase greatness, their stories - and their stats - come alive in your hands. Trade, connect, and celebrate with others as you follow rising stars watch incredible feats of athleticism. With Olympic Village, the Games become personal - and the journey, unforgettable.
Collect
Find kiosks in your local area and tap your phone on the reader to collect your Athlete Player Card (APC)!
After you've got it, add it to your team, or store it in your Village to trade later.
Create
Trade
Trade cards with your friends using the Trades feature to maximise your team.
There are extra points to be earned by having athletes from the same country or sport category on your Team!
Use the quick trade feature and tap your phones together to trade in person.
