Category
Sports
Platform
Mobile App, Website
Collaboration
Product Manager, Developers, QA/QC
Year
2024
Uniscore is a live sports platform where fans follow scores, fixtures, rankings, teams, and players across multiple sports.
As the platform grew, its Search experience needed to support more than generic keyword matching. Fans needed a clearer way to discover different types of content, from teams and players to leagues and sports.
I led the design of a more structured Search experience, exploring how search results, sport selection, and personalization could help users find relevant information more efficiently.
Sports fans don't all search for the same thing. One person might want to find a team, another might look for a player, and someone else might want to explore a league or follow a different sport.
The existing Search experience did not adequately support these different discovery needs. Finding relevant content could become less straightforward as users moved between sports and content types.
The challenge was to make Search more structured and relevant without introducing unnecessary complexity.
I reviewed the existing Search experience and examined how competing sports platforms approached content discovery.
I benchmarked products including AiScore, 365Scores, SofaScore, and FotMob to understand different approaches to search results, sport navigation, and personalized access to sports content.
Rather than copying a competitor's interface, I used the comparison to explore possible directions for Uniscore.
This helped frame the design challenge around three areas:
Content clarity — helping users distinguish between different result types
Sport relevance — making it easier to find content associated with a particular sport
Personalization — reducing the effort required to return to frequently followed teams and content
There were several ways to improve the experience.
One option was to keep a largely universal search experience and improve how results were presented. Another was to introduce more structure, allowing users to narrow their search by sport and navigate between different result types.
The more structured approach offered greater clarity, but it also introduced additional interface elements and implementation considerations.
I evaluated these directions with the goal of balancing discoverability, usability, and engineering effort.
The decision wasn't simply about adding more features. It was about deciding which structure would make Search more useful as the platform supported more sports and content types.
Uniscore supports around 20 sports, so a generic search experience could not always provide the most relevant context for every user.
I proposed introducing sport selection to help users narrow their discovery experience. Combined with clearer result categories, this gave users more control over what they were looking for.
The trade-off was between a simpler interface with less navigation and a more structured experience that made content easier to explore.
I favored the structured approach because it better supported the variety of sports and content available on Uniscore.
This decision helped establish a foundation that could accommodate different sports without relying entirely on a one-size-fits-all search experience.
Search is useful when users know exactly what they want to find, but a sports app also needs to make frequently followed content easy to access.
I incorporated features such as recent searches and quick access to favorite teams to support these different behaviors.
Recent searches help users return to something they looked up before, while favoriting provides a way to keep preferred teams accessible.
These features complement the core search flow rather than replacing it. The goal was to support both direct discovery and repeat access without requiring users to start from scratch each time.
The redesigned experience brought together several elements:
Sport selection to narrow the discovery context
Result categories to distinguish different types of content
Recent searches to revisit previous queries
Favorite actions to make preferred teams easier to access
Together, these elements gave Search a clearer structure and connected it more closely to how fans explore and follow sports.
I designed the interface and interactions around this model, considering how the different elements worked together rather than treating each one as an isolated feature.
Improving Search involved more than choosing the ideal user experience. The proposed structure also had to fit the team's implementation constraints and delivery priorities.
I worked with Product and Engineering to discuss the available directions, understand implementation considerations, and align on a solution that could move forward.
These discussions helped me evaluate design decisions in the context of the wider product, rather than optimizing only for the interface.
The experience reinforced an important principle in my work: a strong design decision needs to balance user value with implementation feasibility.
My role covered reviewing the existing experience, exploring solutions, designing the Search interface, and collaborating with Engineering through implementation.
I shared the proposed flows and design decisions with the team, discussed implementation considerations, and worked through adjustments where needed.
The goal was to preserve the intent behind the experience while making sure the final solution could work within the product's technical constraints.
At first glance, Search can seem like a relatively contained feature: a search field, a results list, and a few supporting interactions.
But in a multi-sport product, the real challenge is deciding how people should navigate different types of content without making the experience unnecessarily complicated.
This project helped me think more deliberately about information structure, prioritization, and the trade-offs between a simple interface and a more capable product experience.
It also reinforced the importance of defining how success will be measured before release. Shipping a solution is one milestone; understanding whether it actually improves discovery is another.
