A gamified card-collection platform that deepens Olympic viewer engagement by connecting audiences with the personal stories of lesser-known athletes.
The Olympic Games spans thousands of athletes across dozens of sports — yet streaming algorithms surface the same familiar names and headline events again and again. Lesser-known athletes and sports don't lack compelling stories; they lack a platform designed to make those stories discoverable.
Athlyst flips the model: instead of passively watching who the algorithm picks, users collect athlete trading cards by watching events — turning breadth of coverage into a mechanic that rewards engagement with the full Games, not just the highlights reel.
Olympic coverage has always been filtered — by broadcast deals, by popularity, and now by recommendation engines that prioritise engagement over breadth. The result: viewers who tuned in for gymnastics leave knowing nothing about weightlifting, shooting, or modern pentathlon.
"To explore how context and storytelling can be seamlessly integrated to enhance the viewing experience of the Olympics — for athletes and sports that rarely get more than ninety seconds of airtime."
Our research confirmed the gap isn't one of interest — it's one of discovery architecture. When people encounter an unfamiliar sport or athlete with context, they engage. Without it, they scroll past. Athlyst's job was to make context the default.
We ran surveys, interviews, and focus groups to understand the range of Olympic viewer archetypes. From this, three personas emerged — from the die-hard fan who wants deeper coverage of athletes they already follow, to the casual viewer who only tunes in when the Games appear on social media.
We built a detailed journey for "Hassan" — a casual viewer who only tunes in when something goes viral. His pain point was specific: he'd hear about an athlete, go looking for more, and hit a wall. Wikipedia. A dead NBC link. The athlete's Instagram with three posts from 2021. The moment of curiosity existed, but there was nowhere real to take it. No story, no schedule, no reason to stay engaged beyond the original clip.
We used Mashups and Crazy 8s to generate concepts, then evaluated three finalists against a decision matrix scoring for engagement potential, educational value, technical feasibility, and novelty. The scores were decisive:
The card collection concept scored highest because it forced breadth by design — every athlete has an equal chance of appearing in a pack. The problem with algorithmic feeds isn't that they curate badly; it's that they curate at all. Randomised packs take that control away. The game mechanic makes it fun. The randomisation makes it equitable.
Users earn athlete trading cards by watching Olympic events live and entering codes shown on screen. Each card carries the athlete's personal story, sport, nationality, and career stats — prioritising narrative over metrics. Cards can be traded with friends via a near-field tap on iPhone or Apple Watch, creating real-world social moments.
Home — Live & Upcoming
Surfaces live events with accessible sport explainers so new viewers can engage even without prior knowledge of the discipline.
Pack Opening
Slide-to-unlock mechanic with confetti feedback on rare cards. The moment of revealing an athlete you've never heard of is the core loop.
Athletes Collection
Browse your collection organised by country and sport. The breadth of the Games becomes visible as your collection grows.
Apple Watch Trade Flow
Tap phones or watches together to trade cards in person — turning Olympic viewership into a social, physical experience.
Athlyst's visual identity uses a triadic colour theme — gunmetal grey as the dominant base, antiflash white for contrast, and electric lime as the primary accent. The vibrant palette adds to the gamified experience while Work Sans keeps typography clean and readable across small card formats.
We tested across three fidelity levels with a consistent protocol: think-aloud tasks, post-interview, SUS survey, and wrap-up interview. But the strategy that paid off most was running heuristic evaluation with expert designers before exposing the prototype to real users.
SUS scores across testing iterations
Low-fi testing revealed the biggest structural issue: the athletes section was hidden behind a globe icon that users consistently mistook for a browser or network button. Average task completion time for that screen was 39 seconds vs 12 seconds for every other task. The fix: make Athletes a primary nav item with an unambiguous card icon.
The expert heuristic evaluation before high-fi testing flagged four major issues we resolved first:
I've never watched synchronised swimming in my life, but I'd watch it to try and get the card.
— User testing participant
The trading card format wasn't chosen because it's fun — it was chosen because it physically equalises representation. Every athlete has the same card format regardless of global profile. The most obscure weightlifter and the most famous gymnast are structurally equal in a pack. That's not a game mechanic; it's a design argument.
My role focused on overseeing the visual identity and aesthetic direction across all prototype iterations. The biggest design challenge was maintaining visual cohesion as the interface grew — Figma's component system was essential for keeping 70+ screens consistent across three fidelity rounds.
Testing experts before users is something I'll carry into every future project. It's far more efficient to fix structural heuristic violations before real users encounter them — and it means user testing yields higher-quality qualitative data, because participants aren't stuck on basic usability friction that could have been fixed in advance.