Celebrating a Summer of Sports
Four unique online games created as part of Sky Sports "Summer of Sports" brand campaign. The goal; to generate renewed excitement and interest amongst Sky's 30,000+ employees across the UK, Italy, and Germany.
Summary
Sky needed to promote its new exclusive sports offering to all employees. Previous engagement campaigns resonated only with existing sports fans, failing to reach the broader workforce. With major sporting events on the horizon, we saw an opportunity to engage employees through competition rather than requiring sports knowledge or pre-existing interest.
Outcome
Within the first week, we eclipsed the success of any previous Sky Sports activation with overwhelming positive engagement.
X3
More interaction than any previous digital activation
120%+
Exceeded overall engagement target in first 4 days
14
Weeks, start-to-finish
Creative team
As the sole designer on a small team consisting of two engineers and a product manager, I was responsible for;
- Game ideation, user flows, and lo-fi wireframes
- In-game illustrations and artwork
- Hi-fidelity prototypes and design handoff
I also delivered supporting design assets and digital ads across Sky properties. Given the tight timelines and demanding deadlines, an agile process was critical to maintaining momentum while setting realistic expectations for what could be delivered.
Challenge and Process
Our long-standing relationship with Sky provided access to data from previous campaigns. Sports promotions consistently underperformed relative to non-sports activities, with engagement primarily driven by dedicated sports enthusiasts. Client workshops revealed fatigue from previous gamified learning attempts and a perception among some employees that sports were simply "boring."
We planned to promote four sports events: F1, British Lions Rugby, Women's Super League, and The Hundred (cricket)—the latter two being new to Sky Sports. To ensure success and avoid previous pitfalls, we established four guiding principles. Each game would:
- Require minimal (if any) previous knowledge of the sport
- Allow users to compete against their peers
- have a significantly different playing experience
- Include a level of customization to make the experience unique
With our guiding principle set, the question standing between us and our solution was...
"...how might we create exciting shared experiences amongst Sky employees, with sports as a central theme?"
Unifying our approach
Time was a significant constraint. To manage this, we created a basic framework for user flows—a template providing both design and engineering teams with agreed-upon steps and constraints to streamline development and accelerate testing.
We focused on rapid prototyping and iteration, moving quickly from lo-fi wireframe sign-off to hi-fi mockups using our in-house design system. This allowed us to iterate effectively with clients and brand partners for each game while ensuring we met their expectations.
Need for Speed
Need for Speed
After overcoming early gameplay testing issues, our Formula 1® experience tested exceptionally well. Late in development, we received the opportunity to collaborate with the on-air broadcast team to integrate video and commentary into the experience.
We successfully delivered a single-trigger race experience with employees competing across three international Grand Prix (one for each Sky territory). Through testing, we developed a matching system that maintained competitiveness by pairing users with opponents of similar performance. The more users played, the smarter the matchmaking became, ensuring a challenging and engaging experience for all skill levels.
It's a Hit!
'The Hundred' sought to modernise cricket for a younger market—a new short-form, action-packed game accompanied by live music and entertainment that shares more similarities with a music festival than traditional cricket. Our experience matched that energy while utilising brand components that make 'The Hundred' unique.
Placing players at bat, users competed against colleagues in a 'Fruit Ninja'-style setting, using swipe motions to interact with elements that make the competition unique—without explicit instruction. Players faced off against LPs, exploding watermelons, and splattering ice creams while attempting to hit one hundred balls. What felt like controlled chaos captured the fast-paced, spontaneous excitement of 'The Hundred.' We even included a rubber duck easter egg for cricket fans to reset their score to zero, ensuring no one felt left out.
The Final Kick
For the Rugby Lions Tour, we placed players at the heart of the action. Users were tasked with scoring the all-important final points to secure a series win for their team. To add narrative depth, we incorporated simple yet effective animated scenes to bookend the playable elements.
The game's simplicity made it engaging. Players swung a guide from left to right to aim their kick, then the game cut to the next scene to reveal the outcome. By keeping interaction simple, players could fully immerse themselves in the game world and enjoy the thrill of making the final kick to win it all.
Wide of the mark
Designed to introduce star names to a new audience, "Super Squads"—a fantasy-sports-style game for the Women's Super League (WSL)—tasked players with building their own team over the first month of the new season. Unfortunately, executing this concept proved more complex than envisioned. These games rely heavily on player data, and for the WSL—as we discovered—comprehensive data was scarce. Additionally, top teams tend to dominate, creating little incentive for users to interact with lesser-performing teams.
To provide a rewarding experience, we narrowed our pool of player profiles to a fraction of the league's athletes through testing and simulations. The theory: by reducing player options, we'd increase the likelihood of producing high-performing teams with enough variance to keep gameplay compelling.
However, last-minute API integration complications caused reliability issues, requiring manual data population. This unforeseen challenge created significant stress for an already stretched team.
Reflection
Changing direction mid-course is challenging when working with tight schedules, but in our case, those constraints drove bold decision-making. Three of our games—The Hundred, Rugby, and Formula 1®—landed exceptionally well. Our Formula 1® game was a particular success, with over 34,000 games played and an average of ten races per player, more than three times the previous record.
The WSL concept, despite our best efforts, struggled to deliver the engaging user experience we envisioned. Short timelines made it difficult to iterate and refine. We made adjustments along the way, but ultimately had to accept a less-than-ideal solution.
This project reinforced the importance of early validation, especially for data-dependent experiences. It also demonstrated that within tight constraints, focusing creative energy on well-defined, simple interactions produces more engaging results than complex systems that require extensive backend support.