Streak

Case Study

Launching the MVP social media monetization platform for athletes

Sector

Social Media, B2C, web3

Role

Lead Product Designer

User Research, User Experience Design, User Interface Design, Design Systems, Prototyping

Platforms

iOS, Android

Streak’s mission is to drive a new era of digital connection and in doing so wanted to launch a web3 hyper-social platform that brings fans closer to the world’s next generation of star athletes.

With the new rules regarding the usage of an athlete’s name, image, and likeness (NIL), Streak wanted to provide athletes the ability to monetize their brand, their messaging, and their stories through a membership-based platform with gated access to live shows, digital assets, and exclusive NFT drops.

My mission? Design the MVP social media app that empowers athletes to monetize their NIL while fostering deeper relationships with fans.

The Problem

Disrupting the status quo

Our leadership team found that athletes — especially less prodigious athletes — were searching for ways to monetize their NIL through social engagement but weren’t having a lot of consistent success. The existing social apps target everyone as a content creator. They rely on this premise to ensure new content is always generated. However, this creates gaps in the experience, a Sisyphean complexity in guided content creation for defined cohorts (like professional athletes), and a missed opportunity to weave in seamless monetization models.

  • Social platforms haven’t implemented seamless monetization opportunities resulting in crufty workarounds like linktree pages.

  • Would-be creators (athletes) lacked guidance from the social platforms, resulting in bland, sporadic, aimless stories content.

  • Athlete perception around generating content for social platforms is “time-consuming” requiring a lot effort without returning much value.

The Opportunity

Guiding better storytelling

At the heart of content creation is storytelling. We had an opportunity to design a platform that inspires great storytelling. What if we could not only ease the friction behind content creation but take it further by unlocking compelling narratives for an athlete’s stories? Athletes have compelling stories, they just need a way to structure those stories into engaging narratives to bring their stories to life. The over-arching theme is that through great first-person narratives, our platform would distinguish itself from other social platforms, galvanize fans, creating monetizable moments.

  • The platform should empower, develop, and coach athletes in content preparation, show creation, and more throughout the entire customer journey

  • Story creation, engagement features, and monetizable moments should work cohesively as part of the core experience

  • The platform should supply the necessary integrated tools and features that deliver a clear, seamless end-to-end experience for content creation

design explorations
Streak design explorations 
final designs

Celebrate the athletes and their stories

Our direction was to showcase athletes and position their stories (shows) in the spotlight. To achieve this, we kept the UI minimal and opted for a neutral, dark experience that pulls the focus toward the content.

  • The UI should play a supporting role as Athletes (creators) are leveraging their NIL with their own set of branded assets, color accent, and, most notably, their own imagery and videos.

  • The UX/UI also needs to be nimble for different types of user groups with different needs in functionality and requirements. The system should adapt to support features and functions.

  • The design system, user interface, and user experience needed to be lightweight to avoid over-engineering with constantly changing and evolving features allowing the product to scale efficiently.

design System

The design system was created in tandem with the mobile app and built specifically to scale for other potential properties and features like an NFT marketplace, the website, and web app products. This ensured we could have a consistent and polished aesthetic throughout the entire product ecosystem.

activation

Streamlining athlete registration and verification was essential to ensuring successful athlete activation on the platform. For the MVP, we worked directly with several professional athletes across key sports to determine an optimal workflow to encourage consistent live show creation and engagement.

Registration

Onboarding

Activation

Minimal account setup and verification

Channel creation with personalization

Athlete show creation

Registration and Verification

Minimal account details were collected for registering a new user and social account authorization was used to as the means for the partnerships team to verify athlete status on the platform.

Activation
Onboarding

Simple editing tools for uploading key art and trailers along with pre-filled show details eased the show creation burden for athletes as they didn’t want nor could spend a lot of time populating content.

While it was essential to keep the UI and content minimal for athletes, it was necessary to provide some level of initial customization. For instance, the athlete could specify their team accent color, which would color render the 3D object (football helmet, baseball cap, etc.) linked to their channel.

Live shows

Live shows were the cornerstone of the platform. With that, we needed to design an experience that would handle the lofty scope of functionality we envisioned. The UI needed to be lightweight, flexible for different user types, and minimal so it wouldn’t disrupt the show content.

Live shows (livestream)

Host views and fan views required different functions but we wanted to preserve the live show layout structure and design to avoid any cognitive overloads as well as adding complexity to the UI.

Athlete (Hosts) Live Show Controls

To encourage more engagement from fans, we designed supplemental actions that hosts could initiate at their discretion. For instance, many athletes responded highly to the ability to drop NFTs directly into the show’s live feed.