The brief
Fastest live scores in the market.
As sole designer, I owned all of it.
CrowdScores had a sharp, real product promise: live football scores faster than any competitor, with a social layer where fans could share in-match opinions in real time. The infrastructure was solid. The design challenge was translating that promise into an app experience that worked in the actual context people used it — phone in one hand, eyes darting between screen and pitch.
My design philosophy became the product's north star: data on mobile should be scannable in under two seconds. Hierarchy over decoration. Information before aesthetics. If it doesn't help someone find what they're looking for faster, it has no reason to exist.
Being the sole designer sharpened that thinking. There was no committee to defer to, no second designer to split the work with. Every decision — from the type system to the icon set to the ad campaign — was mine to make and mine to defend.
That's a different kind of creative responsibility. And I found I was good at it.
The core UX problem — navigation at scale
1,300 matches is a navigation
problem. Search was the answer.
With over 1,300 matches per week across dozens of competitions, finding the game you care about was the hardest problem in the product. The original navigation sent users through country → league → match. Fine for 20 games. Broken for 1,300.
Users don't think in geographic taxonomies. They think in teams. Arsenal. Bayern. PSG. The solution was to rebuild navigation around search as the primary action — not a buried utility. By surfacing powerful, fast search upfront, we collapsed time-to-match from five-plus taps to under two. The insight was obvious in hindsight; getting there required watching real users fail in real time.
Visual design — emotion in a data-dense product
An app fans love, not
just one they tolerate.
A score tracker that only shows numbers is an app people use because there's no better alternative. I wanted CrowdScores to feel different — to have personality. So I designed a complete set of in-match event animations (goals, cards, substitutions, VAR reviews) that communicated events at a glance.
The test for every animation: does it communicate faster than text? If not, cut it. These weren't decorative — they were functional speed improvements.
"Being the only designer forces a clarity of thinking. You can't design by committee. You make the call, defend it, live with it — and get better faster."
James Ciclitira — on CrowdScoresAdvertising — the product had to sell itself
The brand extended beyond
the app. All of it was mine to design.
As sole designer, the brief included advertising — app store assets, campaign imagery, digital placements. Creating a visual identity that stood out in a market full of generic sports apps required the same discipline as the product itself: clear hierarchy, bold contrast, immediate legibility.
