UAE Loves Football
Football fans in the Gulf don't follow one league in one language.
A single household might have a Liverpool fan, a Real Madrid fan, and someone who only cares about the Saudi Pro League, all watching on the same satellite package.
None of them well served by a single app.
The Stakes
It was a product for a client entering a market that already had loud, well-funded incumbents, score apps, broadcaster apps, social platforms, all fighting for the same few minutes of a fan's attention before, during, and after a match.
App to socially discuss a match
App to check scores
App to get broadcast summary
What did I do?
Product Thinking
UX Strategy
User Research
Mobile UI/UX
Information Architecture
Interaction Design
Prototyping
Usability Testing
The Journey
Before opening Figma, I wanted to understand three things: what fans check, when they check it, and why they switch apps mid-match.
I combined competitive teardown, secondary research on regional football consumption habits, and informal conversations with fans in the target market, people who watch matches in majlises, coffee shops, and group chats as much as on their own phones.
Four things came out of it that shaped everything downstream:
Football is consumed in moments
Someone opens the app to answer one question, "Did they score?", "Who's playing tonight?", and expects the answer in one glance, not a scroll.
More data isn't more insight
This audience already has access to huge amounts of stats. What they didn't have was anyone deciding what mattered.
Relevance beats volume
A Liverpool fan doesn't care about most of the day's fixtures. Showing everything is the same as showing nothing.
Information is fragmented
Fans stitch together scores, news, stats, and highlights from different products by habit, not by choice.
2 Personas i got
The Everyday Fan
A few favorite clubs, wants the score and the headline, nothing more.
The Football Enthusiast
Follows multiple leagues and players, wants context and stats, will dig for it.
The Turning Point
I explored three different directions for the home screen, and I killed two of them, including the one the client was most excited about.
The third direction was the conversation where I had to push back on the client's own instinct, with research instead of opinion, and it's the decision the rest of the product hinges on.
Final call: AI became a layer on top of the core football experience, not the entry point to it. AI should enhance discovery, not become another barrier to it.
Everything Dashboard
News-First Home
AI-First Experience
Scores, news, stats, predictions & standings.
The home screen became a wall of competing information.
Nothing felt important because everything was fighting to be important.
Lead with editorial content, reflecting how heavily fans consume football news and social content.
Made AI the front door, letting fans ask anything about a match.
Live scores and match status were pushed further down.
Nobody wants to type a question just to find the score.
The content people came for first was buried.
Asking for information that could simply be visible was friction dressed up as innovation.
So what happened was ...
A Dubai based stakeholder gave out with a brief that sounded simple on a call and turned out to be anything but: "We want a football app. Something that feels premium, feels smart, and works for our market, not just another score tracker."
No wireframes. No feature list. Just a market, a deadline, and a hunch.
I didn't know it yet, but "our market" was going to be the hardest part of this whole project.
MY ROLE
TEAM
UI/UX Designer
1 PM, 1 PD, 3 engineers + more
Case Study
SELECTING FAVORITE LEAGUES
Match Details flow
Scroll
The Solution
Three principles, non-negotiable through every screen.
Fast
Personal
Clear
The most important information, in as few interactions as possible.
Teams, leagues, and players that matter to this user, not a generic feed.
Every screen has one job, not five.
A quick recap of the moments that shaped the game, so fans can catch up without digging through the full match timeline.
AI turns match data and previous stats into quick, contextual predictions without taking the fan out of the match experience.
Who’s starting, where they’re playing, and how the team is set up at a glance.
The Reflection
The biggest thing I'd change: how early I validated the home-screen hierarchy.
I'd get real fans in front of low-fidelity flows earlier, testing three specific tasks before touching high-fidelity UI:
"Find out if your team is playing."
"Understand what happened in a match."
"Find something interesting about your team."
And on AI front, this project taught me that it is most valuable when it shows up exactly where it can add context, not when it's positioned as the destination.
Thanks for watching
The Resolution
Tested with 12 football fans from the target demographic. 11 of 12 completed the core match-discovery task with zero assistance, roughly a 92% completion rate.
Navigation held up
every participant found a match and reached its key info unprompted.
Hierarchy read correctly
fans could tell live info, deep stats, and supporting content apart without being told which was which.
AI's role landed
articipants described it as "extra context," not a replacement for the score itself, which was the whole point of killing direction 3.
Let’s have a word?
Shreyash Mukesh
