Live products · 3 min read
Live sports products should respect attention
The best second-screen experiences know when to help, when to get out of the way, and how to earn the next glance.
The product is not the main event
When someone opens a sports app during a game, the game already has their attention. The product is there to answer a question, explain a moment, or help them catch up. That distinction matters.
It is easy to measure a live product by how long somebody stays inside it. Sometimes that is useful. Sometimes it rewards the wrong behavior. A fan who gets the right answer in three seconds may have had a better experience than someone who spent three minutes searching for it.
The question I prefer is: did we make the live moment easier to understand or more enjoyable?
Design for the glance
Live products operate across different levels of attention. A lock-screen update has a fraction of a second. A play-by-play view might have a minute. A visualization earns more time only when the event is confusing or especially important.
That creates a simple hierarchy:
- Say what changed.
- Explain why it matters.
- Offer depth without demanding it.
The hierarchy sounds obvious. It becomes difficult when every stakeholder has something valuable to add. Editorial wants context. Commercial teams need inventory. Leagues and data partners have requirements. Product teams see opportunities for interaction. None of those needs are wrong, but the moment can still become crowded.
Respecting attention means making a deliberate choice about what wins.
Reliability is part of the interface
At theScore, that hierarchy took a concrete form: Live Activities put game utility on the lock screen, while ScoreCast made pitch location, field position and play state understandable inside the app. A fan could glance at a score or open a deeper visualization without every surface demanding the same amount of attention. The theScore live sports case study shows the product states and the portfolio decisions behind them.
In a live environment, speed and correctness are product features. A beautiful experience that arrives late is not premium. A notification that is wrong once can make the next ten notifications less valuable.
That changes roadmap discussions. Backend resilience, data quality, fallbacks, event-state logic, and operational tooling belong in the same product conversation as the visible interface. The customer experiences the whole system, including the parts they never see.
Commercial value follows usefulness
The strongest commercial opportunities are usually downstream of a product earning attention honestly. If a fan trusts the product during the moments that matter, more sessions and valuable inventory can follow. Reversing that order creates clutter before it creates value.
My best work in live sports has come from treating customer utility and commercial value as one system with a clear sequence: earn the glance, reward the return, then monetize without breaking the behavior that made the opportunity possible.
That is the standard I keep coming back to. A second screen should make the first screen better.
Measure the job, not only the session
A lock-screen surface can be useful without a new app session. That means a measurement plan should distinguish reach, reliable delivery, task completion, return behavior and downstream commercial value. Session growth can describe the portfolio, but it does not explain every surface's contribution on its own.
This is why I separate launches, reported results and business-case projections in the case study. The portfolio prioritization note explains the broader decision frame.