Team Sports

Interaction Awards Winner 2012.

Team Sports

Project Overview

Nike Team Sports and the colors that they wear are legacy, and it’s big business for apparel companies. For quite some time, they had been working with a network of team uniform dealers, coaches, and high school sports stars who were struggling with an antiquated sales process involving paper catalogs and inefficient physical meetings. Nike Team Sports is a 3D team uniform customization platform that literally changes the game. Based off of the wildly popular and highly functional NIKEiD, Nike Team Sports brings the uniform customization process from the analog age to 21st-century digital, and redraws the industry in the process. It's the first platform to venture such a feat and gives Nike a huge competitive advantage in the world of team sports uniforms. From a user experience perspective, Nike Team Sports gives coaches, team members, and dealers alike a beautiful platform where they can easily design, customize, share, and interact.


Context

The Nike Team Sports group realized a growing need to launch a digital tool set in an effort to significantly grow their business. They had been working with a network of team uniform dealers, coaches, and high school sports stars who were struggling with an antiquated sales process involving paper catalogs and inefficient physical meetings.

We did ethnographic research that identified two key problems: first, visualizing how a team uniform would look was lacking at best, and second, there wasn’t a way to share the team uniform designs among the stakeholders and there was no good way of sharing team uniform designs with the important group of decision makers—like parents, coaches, players, dealers, and athletic directors.

Impact

The Nike Team Sports platform transforms the industry, putting robust digital tools at the hub of team uniform creation, while providing a practical way for decision makers to share and revise designs. The uniform builder features a hyper-real 3D avatar athletes where guests can completely customize a team uniform including team and player names, numbers, colors, and design details to professional athlete team standards.

To support the unique collaborative needs of the audiences, a social shopping space lets stakeholders share, vote on, revise, and finally commit to the final team uniform designs. Put simply, with the launch of the Nike Team Sports platform, Nike has revolutionized an outdated process and industry at large.

Craft

From the beginning, the idea was the athlete is the interface. Inspired by game design, we created hyper-real 3D avatars of athletes. To visualize the uniforms in 3D we partnered with Embodee, a start up that creates incredibly intricate photo-real models of apparel that mimic the real stretches, drapes, and fit.

Each avatar appears in their sports’ competitive environment, lending context to the design experience. After a design is created, it can be packaged and shared among the stakeholders, adding collaborative value and streamlining the user experience.

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