Work → IOC Olympics App

Olympics App — from news feed to Olympic experience

The official Olympics app: schedules, results, news and video — during the Games and between them.

Company
IOC — International Olympic Committee
Role
App Lead Designer
Timeline
Nov 2024 – Aug 2026
Scope
UX · UI · Design System · Strategy
Olympics app home screen
Olympics app highlights and personalised feed
Olympics app podcasts
Olympics app watchlist and Originals
TL;DR

The whole case in 30 seconds

The problem

The Olympics app delivered news but created no habit: zero personalization, no interaction, and no reason to open it between Games. A 130-year-old institution, dozens of sponsors and committees — and no room for mistakes.

What I did

Defined the product strategy and hypotheses, redesigned 20+ flows — homepage, feed, onboarding, guest mode, engagement — built two design systems from scratch, adapted for agent-based workflows, and validated the direction with research across three markets.

The outcome

Shipped for Milano Cortina 2026. The app stopped being a news feed — it opens on what each fan follows, holds them through the day, and finally has a reason to exist between Games. Research singled out personalization as “demonstrably effective.”

110M
People reached — app + website, Milano Cortina 2026
2
White-label design systems built from scratch — app & web
61%
Of fans rated the Games experience "Gold" in post-launch research
Want to dive in? ↓ Try the prototype
The challenge
"The old approach: put everything everywhere. The new one: give every piece of content its right place."

The Olympics app had accumulated years of features without a clear information hierarchy. Content was duplicated, personalization was non-existent, and the homepage tried to do too much at once. The challenge was not to add more — it was to make sense of what was already there, and design for what users actually needed.

The IOC is a 130-year-old institution. Dozens of sponsors, national committees, and stakeholders — all with a seat at the table. Design decisions don't move fast, so my job was to make every proposal self-evident: thorough rationale, clear tradeoffs, external research to back direction.

Product hypotheses

The thinking behind the redesign

The Olympics app is a moment-driven product — interest peaks around events and stories, not a constant content stream. So engagement had to be built around deepening key moments, not infinite scrolling. I formalized this into two hypotheses and a four-step product strategy, which I proposed and defended to stakeholders.

HYPOTHESIS 1
A personal guide, not a content library

If the app helps users understand what matters to them at each Olympic moment, they'll perceive it as valuable even with limited content volume. Shift the product's role from "show everything" to "guide me through what's important right now" — less cognitive load, more relevance.

HYPOTHESIS 2
Engagement comes from meaning, not frequency

In a between-Games product, engagement isn't built on daily habits but on depth of experience per moment. Interaction creates context, anticipation, and reflection — before, during, and after events — rather than driving endless usage.

  1. 01 Strengthen the foundation
  2. 02 Introduce engagement layers
  3. 03 Make registration meaningful
  4. 04 Expand interaction models
Research · Validation

Testing the direction with real fans

Before committing to the new direction, we ran an external usability study: 29 participants across Germany, India, and the USA. We tested two app homepage variants, the new Feed prototype, and the live Olympics.com mobile homepage.

FINDING 01
The homepage was too long
Users didn't scroll past the fold. They wanted the first screen to show what matters right now.
FINDING 02
Personalization — without losing discovery
Users wanted to follow their favorite athletes and countries — but not at the cost of losing the ability to discover something new.
FINDING 03
"Choose favorites" came too late
Users expected to pick favorites the moment they opened the app, not after spending a long time exploring it. Personalization turned out to matter far more than expected.
FINDING 04
Feed = entertainment
Users predicted the Feed's purpose from the name alone. The content wasn't adapted to the user and wasn't compelling enough to keep scrolling.
FINDING 05
No winner between homepage variants
One variant read as premium but too minimal; the other as familiar but Instagram-derivative. The recommendation: a hybrid — navigational value of one, restraint of the other.
FINDING 06
Three markets, three mental models
German users preferred text and structure, Indian users loved visuals and interactivity, American users benchmarked everything against ESPN. One product, very different expectations.
Findings

Every piece of content earns its own place — if it isn't immediately relevant, it doesn't lead. Users need a reason to come back every day: the feeling that the product is alive and relevant right now. Personalization comes first — the user shows us what matters, and the product shows more of it, active and passive, without losing the joy of stumbling onto something new.

Direction shift

Before → After

BEFORE
✗
Content everywhere at once
Homepage tried to surface all sections simultaneously — news, videos, schedules, athletes, results. No hierarchy.
✗
Heavy duplication
Same content appeared in multiple places. No single source of truth for the user.
✗
Zero personalization
Every user saw the same thing. No feed tailored to interests, sports, or athletes.
✗
Passive experience
Read, watch, leave. No interaction, no engagement, no reason to return.
AFTER
✓
Redesigned homepage
Clear hierarchy, focused sections, content given its right context and place. Less noise, more signal.
✓
New Feed page
A dedicated, personalized stream — content surfaced based on user preferences, followed sports, and athletes.
✓
Personalization at the core
The product now knows who you follow. Your interests shape what you see — across homepage, feed, and notifications.
✓
Polls & Trivia
Fans can now participate — not just consume. Event-tied polls and Olympic trivia woven into the content experience.
The redesign in screens

Homepage · Feed

A deliberately small selection — only the most visible changes. The full redesign covered 20+ flows across the entire app.

01 — Homepage
Full redesign — from cluttered to focused
Before
  • Everything surfaced at once, no hierarchy
  • Same content duplicated across sections
  • Zero personalization — every user saw the same page
After
  • Clear sections, each content type in its right place
  • Personalized based on sports and athletes you follow
  • Less noise — more signal
BEFORE
Olympics app homepage — before the redesign
Scroll inside
AFTER
Olympics app homepage — after the redesign
Scroll inside
Feed — the new personalized content page
Scroll inside
NEW PAGE
02 — Feed
Built from scratch — didn't exist before
  • Personalized stream of content based on who you follow
  • Mixed format — articles, videos, podcasts, highlights in one place
  • Masonry grid adapts to content type and length
  • A reason to open the app every day, not just during events
Deep dive · Onboarding & guest experience

The biggest redesign isn't a screen — it's the path into the app

18 → 9
Screens to Home — the sign-up path cut in half
~2 min
Estimated time to Home, down from 4–6 minutes
100%
Olympic ID requirements preserved — same data, less friction
INTERACTIVE PROTOTYPE
  • —The app now greets you with the Games, not a cookie banner — value before legal.
  • —Account creation collapsed from three screens into one.
  • —Email verification stopped blocking the door.
  • —Push permission is asked when you favorite something — at the moment it makes sense.
  • —Scrolling 1000+ athletes became a sport swipe; athletes follow later, while browsing.

The guest-state framework

Making "Continue as guest" a first-class path meant defining how every screen behaves without an account. I audited the whole navigation map and reduced it to a reusable system: content always visible, personalization locked — six treatment types, three prompt intensities.

VISIBLEIdentical to registered. Articles, replays, schedules, scores — the Olympic story stays open.
READ-ONLYSee the polls, reactions, and results — interacting triggers a soft prompt. One free taste included.
LOCKEDLooks normal, no lock icons — "you can almost have this" converts better than "you can't".
HIDDENPersonalization rails and account sub-pages simply don't exist. Home stays clean, not gated.
EMPTY STATEDestinations like Notifications explain their value with a sign-in CTA instead of failing.
REPLACEDProfile shortcut routes to sign-in directly — the tap itself is the wall, no interstitial.

Engagement mechanics

PARTICIPATION
Quizzes & Polls

Interactive moments tied to live events — predict outcomes before, react after. Surfaced contextually in the homepage and feed, not as a standalone feature.

ACCESS MODEL
Guest vs Registered

Guests browse freely. Registered users unlock personalization, polls, and persistent favorites. Registration becomes a value exchange — not a barrier.

PERSONALIZATION
Favorites as relevance engine

Favorites no longer just save content — they shape what appears in the feed and homepage. The foundation of personalization, in rollout when I handed the work over.

My scope

Strategy · Roadmap · Design · Systems

This is not a project where I executed someone else's vision. The product direction, improvement proposals, roadmap priorities, and all design output are mine. My PM approves — the thinking comes from me.

Product strategy
Identified the core problem, proposed the engagement direction, defined priorities — including the shift from passive consumption to active participation.
Full app redesign
Homepage, feed, podcast, article, engagement features — 20+ user flows redesigned across the entire app.
Design systems
Separate systems for app and web — full component libraries, tokens, documentation, and handoff specs.
Stakeholder alignment
Navigating sponsors, international committees, and political constraints — advocating for user experience at every step.
Challenges

Designing at the intersection of sport, politics, and brand

POLITICAL COMPLEXITY

The Olympics is one of the most politically sensitive global products — every decision touches on representation, neutrality, and international relations. Navigating that was a project in itself.

SPONSOR ECOSYSTEM

Dozens of global sponsors, each with visibility requirements and brand guidelines. Balancing their presence against a clean user experience — without any single sponsor dominating — required constant negotiation and system thinking.

EXTREME SCALE

110 million users in two weeks. No gradual rollout, no room to iterate post-launch. Every flow, every edge case, every error state had to be right before the Games began — at a scale where small mistakes become global issues.

ONE PRODUCT, EVERY AUDIENCE

From a casual viewer watching athletics once every four years to a dedicated fan who follows every athlete by name — the same interface has to work for both. Designing for breadth without losing depth was a constant balance.

INHERITED VISUAL LANGUAGE

The app already had a design system, but one built before tokens — outdated, inconsistent, hard to scale. We rebuilt it as two proper white-label systems. The visual language itself I inherited: brand governance allowed almost no changes to the existing UI, so the interface style here isn't my visual direction. My contribution is the layer underneath — flows, architecture, systems, and product logic.

Results · Milano Cortina 2026

The Games happened. The fans answered.

During the Games (February 11–17, 2026), an independent fan research community — 58 Olympic fans across France, Italy, and the USA, half on the app and half on mobile web — evaluated the live experience day by day: from schedules and results to editorial content, personalization, and key journeys.

61%
Rated the app experience "Gold" on the Olympic scale (Gold / Silver / Bronze / Didn't make the final)
84%
Gold or Silver — across all three markets, on both app and mobile web
110M
People reached by the app and website during Milano Cortina 2026

"I think the Olympics have really done a lot to get everyone involved in the Games in a simplified and active way. It's hard to find something they can improve on."

ITALY · APP

"I found the interface was better made, access to several categories was simpler… the site is the easiest it has been to use in recent years."

FRANCE · RETURNING PARIS 2024 FAN
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