From pitches to pixels – UX lessons from the world of sport

The explosion in sporting documentaries and docuseries have brought regular punters closer to the action than ever before. Whether it’s Formula 1’s Drive to Succeed, Michael Jordan’s The Last Dance, or rugby’s Six Nations Full Contact, these programmes and the books, podcasts and speaking tours which follow them, give us a glimpse into how sporting teams seek to get the most from the elite athletes within them.

As someone who has made his living from design thinking, I am particularly interested in how these teams think.? What do they do with their minds? How do they deal with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in the form of the dropped pass, the season-ending injury, the missed world cup, the winning goal, the successful manoeuvre, and the pre-planned tactic come good? How do Formula 1 teams manage the egos and ambition of their drivers, how do rugby teams ensure their players optimise their own performance but never at the expense of the team?

And what might any of this have to do with design?? Or with life more broadly?

What sport, design and life all have in common is that they are better, richer and more fulfilling when they are done consciously and deliberately. The best sport teams prepare for battle in the same way – plan, execute, review, improve, repeat – a process which will be familiar with anyone involved in design.

Could it be that the mindsets and philosophies which have served the world’s most successful sports team so well could apply to design? This author thinks so.? Here are three which really resonate.

Let’s be the best in the world at things which require no talent

(Paul O’Connell, Irish and British and Irish Lions Captain, 115 caps)

?O’Connell was referring to doing the easy things brilliantly and consistently.? Things like chasing back, supporting teammates and projecting positivity. Such was the impact of this concept that British and Irish Lions Coach Warren Gatland adopted it as one of his four pillars for all Lions tours.

The principle of being world-class at the easy stuff is immediately applicable by designers. Creative design and brand development work can be difficult and requires rare talent, but other types of design (particularly some aspects of interaction design) just require a comprehensive understanding of effective design patterns.? The theory book for form design, validation and error handling, menu systems and progress indication is well established and there’s simply no excuse for now knowing it and using it.

Paul O’Connell’s lesson for designers is to be 100% at the easy stuff which requires no debate, no fuss, no fanfare.? It just needs done.? Properly.

Marginal gains

(Dave Brailsford, former Performance Director of British Cycling and Team Sky)

Brailsford's believed that if you broke down everything that was involved in riding a bike and improve each component by 1%, you would achieve a significant aggregated increase in performance. In practical terms nearly every aspect of a rider’s life as a professional athlete was put under the microscope:

• Equipment – bikes, helmets and suits were optimised for aerodynamics and weight
• Nutrition – each rider had a tailored nutrition and hydration plan, specific to their individual training and recovery needs
• Training – physiological data, performance metrics, and recovery times were used to give every rider a tailored regime to maximise their training efficiency and effectiveness
• Recovery – including innovations which are mainstream today such as ice baths, massage therapies and sleep optimisation
• Clothing – fabric and fit to reduce drag and improve aerodynamic efficiency across a range of weather conditions
• Maintenance – mechanics developed meticulous routines to ensure that every bike was in optimal condition, including polishing frames and components to reduce drag and using specially formulated lubricants for the chain
• Mindset – sports psychologists worked with riders, focusing on confidence-building, stress management and concentration techniques
• Race tactics – Detailed analysis of race routes, competitors, and potential scenarios were conducted to inform race strategies
• Positioning – using computers and wind-tunnels, each rider’s position was optimised to improve comfort and reduce aerodynamic drag
• Hygiene – well riders are strong riders, sick riders are weak! Riders reduced the chances of illness with stringent hand-washing routines and the use of antibacterial gels and wipes

With no exceptions, every world-leading digital product has marginal gains baked into its DNA. Perhaps the poster-child for this, probably by virtue of being around the longest, is Amazon. The world’s best known e-commerce platform calls marginal gains a Day-1 mindset, where victory is expressed as customer-obsession. This has manifested in thousands and thousands of optimisation tests, ran all day every day for a quarter of a century.? Every time Amazon succeeds in such a test they build that marginal gain into the product, over time putting clear blue water between them and their competitors.

Bezos summed up the imperative in his 2016 shareholders letter “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”

Jeff Bezos’ message for designers is to deconstruct the problem into its constituent parts and optimise every single part as far as you can. All those small gains will have a big impact.

Will it make the boat go faster?

(Ben Hunt-Davis, Olympic Gold Medallist in Rowing 8s, Sydney 2000)

As an individual, Hunt-Davis returned home empty-handed from the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and as a nation the British men’s Rowing 8s team hadn’t won the Olympics since 1912.? Yet after years of underperforming, they won gold at the Sydney Olympics in 2000.

In pursuit of this goal, the team responded to everything with a simple question “Will it make the boat go faster?” If the answer was yes, they did it and if the answer was no, they didn’t. They measured everything under this lens – their diet, how they trained, where they trained, how they raced. They kept iterating, trying new things, keeping what worked, ditching what didn’t. Famously they didn’t attend the opening ceremony of the 2000 Olympics, because they didn’t see how it would make their boat go faster.

They won gold.

There are many advantages to designers for adopting this mindset, but perhaps the strongest one is that it forces design to have a purpose beyond prettiness. Will it make the boat go fast becomes will it generate more leads, will it ward off competitive threat, will it sell more units, will it raise average order value, will it reduce support costs? The articulation of purpose provides the benchmark by which design performance can be assessed.? Once that is in place, each individual design decision can be tested, measured and either incorporate and ignored, just as Hunt-David and his colleagues tested training, diet and race techniques.

Ben Hunt-Davis’ message for designers is to ruthlessly measure everything you do to assess if it aids the mission, is neutral to the mission or hinders the mission.? Don’t let anything hinder the mission, whether it’s the latest trend, the product sponsor’s latest great idea or something cool you saw on Dribbble. Identify and name your north star, point your compass at it and do not deviate.

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