I was responsible for designing the user interface for Forza Football Reporter — an app created to get a step closer to fulfill the company's vision of an equal and accessible world of football.
Together with a small engineering team, we built a tool that empowers any local team to share live updates of their games, finally enabling 3 million monthly users to follow their son or daughter's game in the very same app as the top European players and teams.
Team
Design & User research: Oscar Fredriksson, Robin Höberg.
Product & Engineering: Alex Sundbäck, David Söderberg, Jonathan Lundqvist, Kristoffer Melin, Thierery Godwin.
Professional teams account for less than 0.1% of all football played worldwide. To cover the remaining 99.9% that media ignores, Forza Football tasked me and three engineers, all Master students at the time, with designing and developing a live-reporting tool tailored for the sidelines.
An app that empowers any fan, parent or coach to report major events like goals, cards, and substitutions as they happen, real-time — bringing immense value to local fans and pushing Forza Football closer to its ultimate goal of covering every single match in the world.
Discovery & Research
My design process began with a deep discovery phase to understand the full context and landscape of the intended product. I focused on three key areas:
Competitor Analysis: I benchmarked the existing market to understand what tools, if any, were already trying to solve the same problem.
User Research: I conducted interviews with intended users (coaches, parents and fans) to map out their current pain points and needs.
Stakeholder Interviews: I met with internal Forza employees to understand the company's heritage and, most importantly, define where this new product would fit within their existing ecosystem.
Insights
During the discovery work, I realized that coaches are drowned with stuff to do right before the start of a match; running through tactics, refilling water bottles and warming up the players.
I therefore structured the flows of the experience to nudge users to prepare as much as they possibly can before game day. Considereing a game can be eventful and hectic, it was crucial for us to enable instant feedback on all reported events,
as well as allowing users to edit or remove a reported event once an error occurs.
Obviously, users will have their attention on the game majority of the time. When they need to report an event in the tool, the tool needs to be snappy with minimal steps to enable users to to quickly return to watching the game.
I mapped out flows for each event we wanted to support, to see if we could re-use components and patterns to establish consistancy throughout each user journey.
Exploration of journey to report a goal.
Decisions & Compromises
Since we only had the summer to create a fully-working first proof of concept (spoiler alert: we all got hired to continue working on the app after the internship), we had to optimize for velocity and speed of execution.
A decision was made to develop the app in React essentially allowing all desktop and smartphone users to access the experience. Despite our wish to support all major events from the get go,
we ended up focusing on the very essential ones for the MVP release; goals, injuries ans substitutions namely. Getting these right and opting for quality rather than qunatity felt like the right decision.
Another crucial feature of the main Forza Football app is to view the standings. Problem for us was that an accurate standing would require every single team of a league to report their games, something that
was unrealisitc for our launch. We therefore had to temporarily disable this functionality until we could figure out a scalable work around; like fetching this data from trustworthy sources, sucha as the different football federations.
Final product
The final design was built for speed and control, placing myself in the shoes of a reporter in the high-pressure environment of a live match. I structured the user interface around a simple three-tab layout to separate the user's workflow into three distinct, focused stages:
Pre-Match: The first tab handles all setup, like line-ups and formations, getting those details out of the way long before kickoff to save the reporter from stress on game day.
Live Reporting: This is the core of the app. It features a familiar event timeline from the Forza Football app and large, tap-friendly buttons, ensuring reporters can start to capture a goal or card with a single, quick interaction.
Advanced Stats: The third and final tab is for the true "power-users." By moving complex stats like possession, shots, and free kicks here, we kept the main reporting screen clean and fast, avoiding clutter for the 90% of users who just need the basics.
Impact
Forza Football Reporter became the official featured reporting tool for Gothia Cup, the world's largest youth football cup, in 2019.
After this acknowledgement, the tool quickly got a lot of attention, both in football communities, but also within the company behind Forza Football – the main livescore app.
The user base had seemingly reached a plateau for the main app and Forza Football Reporter was seen as a stepping stone to kick-start new growth.
What started as a summer project with four Master students, ended up being the company's biggest bet with a team of 9 employees working on it full time when I left two years later, in 2020.
Promotional video for Forza Football Reporter.
TL;DR
The Challenge: Helping Forza Football cover the 99.9% of football matches completely ignored by mainstream media.
My Role: Led the end-to-end design of the Forza Football Reporter app, taking it from a proof-of-concept summer project to a scaled company driver.
The Solution: Created a streamlined, 3-tab mobile experience optimized for fast, low-friction sideline reporting across pre-match setup, live events, and advanced stats.
The Impact: Became the official reporting tool for the Gothia Cup and grew the initiative from a solo project into a dedicated 9-person product team.
