The digital platform that brought the Tokyo Olympics to millions of Dutch viewers and set a new standard for NOS product design.
Olympic Games Tokyo
Product concept · UX · 2019 – 2022
The summer of 2021 was an exceptional one for Dutch sports. The European Championships, Tour de France and Olympic Games took place within weeks of each other, what NOS called ‘de sportzomer’ (Summer of Sports). For the Olympics, NOS needed a fully dedicated digital platform, built to handle the scale of the biggest sporting event in the world. This project became the foundation for a new era of NOS digital products.
Design a dedicated Olympic experience for NOS.nl and the NOS app across iOS, Android and web, covering live sport, highlights, medal standings and news.
Video was central to the brief. With most competition scheduled at night due to the seven-hour time difference with Japan, the platform also needed to solve an engagement challenge: how do you keep audiences coming back throughout the day when the sport is finished by the time they wake up?
Together with Dionne van Dijk, I was responsible for the complete design process, from concept and UX strategy through visual design, prototyping and stakeholder presentations, to the component library and post-launch feature development. We worked in close collaboration with the NOS Sport team and three development teams throughout.
Process
Building on user data and insights from previous Olympic editions, we refined existing personas and mapped a focused user journey to start concepting quickly. Planning was tight, but quality was never compromised. Being an event product created room to be bold. New features were easier to propose and approve within a defined scope.
The morning recap, short vertical video formats, livestream alerts and an expanded results section all came from that freedom. Editors raised valid concerns, which we addressed with usability testing and data. The features earned their place, and their success later made the case for building them into the broader NOS platform.
Results
The platform launched in July 2021 and exceeded all expectations. 7 in 10 Dutch people, 11.4 million in total, followed the Games via NOS, averaging 13 hours of Olympic content each. The dedicated Olympic website attracted 6.4 million unique visitors in just two weeks, and 21 million livestreams were started during the Games. The success of the product was a direct catalyst for the full NOS platform redesign that followed.
Unique Visitors
6.4 million
Livestreams
21 million
Credits
This project was a team effort. I worked closely with Dionne van Dijk (digital designer) and collaborated across three large development teams who brought the designs to life.
Tools used:
Sketch
Miro
Lookback
Jira