NFL+ Streaming
Building the streaming experience that brought live football and the NFL's entire game library cross platform for the first time.
The NFL mobile app has over 8.5 million active weekly users and with the end of a decade-old rights deal came the opportunity for a new in-house streaming opportunity. I led a multi phase design of the NFL's exclusive football streaming product, NFL+ across mobile (iOS & Android), web and CTV.
Role
Senior Product Designer
timeline
September 2021 – July 2022
THE CHALLENGE
We were asked to launch NFL+ as the exclusive home for live NFL games on mobile (a feature notably missing from our own CTV and Web platforms) while entering streaming for the first time with no institutional playbook. The mandate was double-sided and often at odds: create a distraction-free, trustworthy viewing experience for fans, while building in the ad inventory the business needed to sustain partnerships.
BUSINESS IMPACT
The NFL's mobile live game rights had been part of a decade long deal that came to a close at the end of 2021, giving NFL Media the opportunity to have its first in-app exclusive subscription service. A subscription service would open the door for new ad revenue, partnerships, user retention/funnels and exclusive content opportunities we never had before.
18.7 million | 8.5 million | 89% |
|---|---|---|
NFL fans on average watch a regular season game live on TV | unique active users visit the NFL App weekly | of households in the U.S. are subscribed to a streaming service |
MY ROLE & SCOPE
I was the design lead on the NFL+ project, responsible for managing mobile and web, directing the overall design approach, and owning the most complex parts of the experience. My team (our senior director and, later on, a CTV designer) worked in parallel to cover the breadth of the CTV platform, with our Creative & Branding team setting the creative direction and Design, DTC & Product making key decisions at every stage.
The scope included the full viewing experience across platforms: the home page, content discovery, live game access, NFL Network, game replays, the multi-game watch experience, and the full subscription and paywall flow. Every surface needed to communicate the value of NFL+ clearly and honestly, especially for users who weren't sure what they could actually watch with their subscription. For this case study we will focus on the NFL+ home page - our 'playlist of football'.
RESEARCH & DISCOVERY
We started the project by auditing the existing NFL replay library and cataloging every user-facing touchpoint.
I led a deep-dive into NFL+ customer support data and past user research to identify the most common points of confusion. Two things came up consistently: fans didn't understand which games they could access with their subscription tier, and content discovery was too difficult, especially during the season when the volume of available content was highest.
I then ran a competitive analysis across the major streaming services, looking specifically at how they handled complex content availability, subscription upsells, and multi-game viewing contexts. This research directly informed the information hierarchy decisions we made throughout the redesign.
THE DESIGN PROCESS
The design process started with a comprehensive journey map covering every touchpoint a user could encounter throughout the NFL season lifecycle. Football seasons have distinct phases, preseason, regular season, playoffs, Super Bowl, offseason, and fan behavior and content availability change dramatically across each one. The design needed to flex with those changes rather than feel static.
I led my team through user journey mapping and edge case documentation before anyone touched a wire-frame. Understanding all the ways a user could hit a paywall, encounter content they couldn't access, or get confused about their subscription tier was essential before we could design solutions for any of them.
From there, we moved into information architecture definition, establishing the UX guidelines that would govern how we presented content, communicated availability, and handled upsells across the entire platform. Wire-framing followed across every key surface, with multiple rounds of internal feedback before we began the interface design phase. I ran frequent working sessions with engineering to confirm feasibility as we went, which meant far fewer surprises during development.
OUR SOLUTION
The new NFL+ CTV and Web experience launched in time for the 2023 regular season. The redesign introduced a clear content hierarchy that separated live and upcoming games, NFL Network programming, and replay content into distinct, visually differentiated sections. For the first time, fans could understand at a glance exactly what was available to them, and why content they couldn't access was locked.
The subscription and paywall experience was redesigned to be transparent rather than frustrating. Instead of hitting a wall and not understanding why, users could see clearly what their current subscription included and what an upgrade would unlock. This context-driven approach to upsells significantly reduced the friction around subscription misunderstandings.
The multi-game watch experience brought simultaneous game tracking to CTV for the first time, allowing fans to follow multiple games in one session without constantly switching between them. The interface was designed to keep the primary game front and center while surfacing key moments from secondary games through a persistent, low-interruption sidebar.
RESULTS & IMPACT
Designing for a subscription product with a genuinely complex offering taught me how much design can do to reduce perceived complexity without actually simplifying the underlying product. The NFL's game rights structure isn't getting simpler. What we could control was how clearly and honestly we communicated it to fans. That framing, that design's job here is to make the truth easier to understand rather than to hide it, fundamentally shaped every decision we made.
Leading a team of designers on a project of this scale also pushed me to develop stronger systems for design quality control. When multiple people are working across a platform simultaneously, the risk of inconsistency is high. I built regular design review sessions and a shared decision-making framework that kept the work cohesive even as the team worked in parallel.
Finally, this project reinforced the business impact of great product design. The $120 million result in year one wasn't just a good outcome for the NFL. It was evidence that investing in a genuinely better user experience, one that was clearer, more beautiful, and more honest with fans, directly drives subscription value.
WHAT I LEARNED & WHERE I WOULD GO
Content consumption patterns are very nuanced across our fan base. We have busy dads that want to be able to watch replays of Sundays best games after their kids are in bed. There are moms in Wisconsin that just want access to the live Packers game that week no matter what, even if they only get to listen to a radio broadcast. There are fans that want to watch all the games their favorite college athletes are now professionally playing in. No matter how hard we try, there will not be a one size solution fits all, we needed to focus on the path with the least friction.
Our main challenge was communicating the complicated game offering to users. The National Football league partners with a wide variety of streaming services and cable providers to share their live games with an incredibly large fan base. This means that live games cannot be consumed on your TV or Desktop without third party authorization (unless it is a NFL Network game). However, they can be watched on Tablets and Mobile devices where we also provide NFL+ if they are local or primetime games. This complexity creates a confusing product offering.