On September 5, the 2024 NFL season kicks off with a rematch between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Baltimore Ravens. If last year’s ratings are any indication, more than 28 million viewers are likely to tune in.
But rather than TV, many will be watching on the freshly redesigned NFL app. Or they’ll watch on TV, while also using the NFL app.
According to the NFL, 10 million fans used its official app every week last year. Now, alongside the studio Code and Theory, it’s launching a significant redesign just in time for kickoff. It’s something of an attempt to be everything to every possible type of football fan—but ultimately, it’s a vehicle to sell the NFL’s own direct-to-consumer streaming offering, NFL+. While the organization made $13 billion last year largely from shopping media rights to broadcasters ranging from NBC to Amazon, this $6.99/mo service plugs into the app to stream local games and related programming right to your phone (or you can link it with your cable provider).
While the previous app was popular, it was a little clunky, less media-forward, and perhaps even unambitious for a brand the size of the NFL.
“The prior iteration of the app was in many ways, essentially our website designed into an app,” says David Jurenka, SVP of NFL Media and general manager, LA. “As opposed to making sure we’re thinking of the unique experiences we’re providing on the app, and how we’re facilitating those.”
While much of the content of the two apps is ultimately the same, the presentation and execution turns games, clips, stats, and news into a coordinated week-long saga.
Not a feed, but a schedule
Since Facebook and Twitter, the feed has been the de facto organizing principle of much of the internet. Just pile up media, and let users dig through in an endless list of options. Every day you load TikTok, it’s basically the same endless big buffet updated with some new dishes.
The NFL app worked in much the same way, piling up the same mix of scores and highlights all the time.
“Previous iterations of this app had the same structure seven days a week,” says Lauren Manning, head of product design, UX, and research at the NFL. “We spent a lot of time [adding] contextual hierarchy.”
That means the week starts on Wednesday, when newly designed, brightly colored team-matchups appear in the app. From there, the app presents previews of the games that kick off on Thursday and will continue into Sunday and Monday.
“The schedule is the backbone of the page, and [we] use that as a dynamically powered structure of before, during, and after of each game,” says Manning. “The ability to watch the live game, is the center of the ecosystem. That creates the gravity for the artifacts around the game…what will happen, what’s happening, what happened?”
By Monday, with most of the week’s games done, the app is mostly replays, which leads into something of a football hangover on Tuesday, the app’s quietest day of recaps (and one would suspect, usage.)
Manning notes that the weekly “engagement arc” that anchors the app’s programming is unique to football, largely because sports like the NBA and MLB have so many more games each year, while the NFL can focus on shorter, cleaner storylines in a 17-game season. As such, the league says it uses a light hand curation and AI personalization to decide what to serve you next. “It’s not some crazy high volume AI-driven personalization algorithm, we don’t need that much volume to get you fewer things that are high quality,” says Manning.
Empowering modern “watching” (aka, fantasy and gambling)
The centerpiece of the app is those live games that you can only watch with NFL+. While the previous app barely showed people what they were missing out on, the updated app dangles these subscription-only offerings
“The actual game is the best carrot you can dangle in a DTC experience,” says Manning. “Previously, the non-paying experience was quite still and quiet.”
Yet the NFL app is not trying to be Netflix. It doesn’t prioritize video so much that you’re hand-guided to a full screen experience. And it isn’t nerfed to be a “second screen” to what you’re watching on your television, either.
“[It’s] balancing the focused versus the multitasking fan,” says Arjun Kalyanpur, senior director of product strategy at Code and Theory. And this fan is basically every fan. Because if your home team is playing, then you likely want to watch more closely. But if you’re just following your fantasy players around the league, or keeping up on a bet, you are likely hopping around in a Sunday-long fever dream, as an average of 14 games are played across three matchup windows across the league.
Much of the NFL app’s job is to lighten the cognitive load on the monstrous amount of programming the NFL produces each week. Sunday is a day of games, and you may be sorting through all of them for the specific details on a single kicker who is key to your fantasy lineup. Even NFL Redzone, a live streaming show that gets its own tab in the app, is a means to mitigating mental strain: it’s a program that follows football all day and promises you’ll see every single touchdown across the league without ever changing the channel. Notably, one of the stickiest parts of the app isn’t even related to streaming at all, but one piece of data that the NFL owns as an authority: the injury report. “If you’re playing fantasy or into sports betting, that’s critical information!” Manning notes.
The updated streaming UX is far more forgiving to multitaskers, allowing you to keep a game picture-in-picture, or to simply listen to the game while flicking through the app without hiccups. One of the key pieces to easy multitasking is a new “Game Switcher.” It’s basically a series of scores that appear as buttons on top of the screen. Tap on any, and you hop to a page about that game with details and the option to watch (kind of like channel surfing, but within the app).
Of course, the catch is that you still can’t watch every game within the NFL app. The league’s broadcast licensing has been sliced and diced between so many regions and companies that you will ultimately hit a wall where you can’t fully experience a matchup in the app, in which case, the NFL app will untangle the yarn of broadcasting rights and tell you where it’s available.
“If we can deliver it there there with NFL+ we will, otherwise, we need to make sure we can facilitate them to that game so they can find the right experience to watch it,” says Jurenka. “The opportunity we have is to organize that content, and engage fans so they don’t feel like they have to go to a lot of places to assimilate a great football experience.”
