Add hero image — in-game live view across platforms
As lead product designer for March Madness Live, I shaped the cross-platform experience for one of the most watched sporting events in the country. My focus was the Bracket Challenge fueling fan engagement through real-time predictions, the Game Switcher, and enabling seamless transitions between simultaneous games. Both features had to work flawlessly across mobile, web, and connected TV, each with its own interaction model, latency constraints, and audience behavior.
Add hero image — in-game live view across platforms
March Madness runs for three weeks, peaks at 67 simultaneous games, and serves fans who expect real-time updates, zero lag, and the freedom to jump between streams mid-play. Designing for that is already hard. Designing it across mobile, web, and connected TV simultaneously — where each platform has a different interaction model, different hardware constraints, and a different user posture — is a systems design challenge at scale.
The Bracket Challenge and Game Switcher were the two features that made or broke the digital experience. Get them right and fans stay engaged. Get them wrong and they switch to a competitor or just watch TV.
The Bracket Challenge and Game Switcher had to work across three platforms — each with its own posture, input method, and performance envelope. A single design system provided shared tokens and brand consistency. Everything else was platform-specific.
The Bracket Challenge is the primary engagement driver for March Madness Live. Fans fill out predictions before the tournament starts and return constantly to track how their picks are performing. The design challenge: real-time updates to a 67-game bracket need to feel immediate without creating anxiety-inducing visual chaos. Wins, upsets, and eliminations all communicate differently depending on whether it's your pick or a rival's.
During the first round of March Madness, up to four games air simultaneously across TBS, TNT, TruTV, and CBS. The Game Switcher is the feature that lets fans follow the tournament instead of a single game — jumping to a buzzer beater in progress, catching an upset in the final minute, or monitoring three games at once. Every second of latency in the switching experience is a missed moment.
