Athlete Medical App RFP

🎯 The challenge

• NBA players needed a way to view and share decades of personal medical history, often spanning many years and team changes

• Existing processes were fragmented: large PDFs and boxes of physical files stored in garages.

• The solution had to make massive, complex records both searchable and user-friendly—with the same ease as everyday consumer apps.

🔍 Research & Inspiration

• With the main issue being allowing athletes to find specific medical information within years of data, we focused on looking at how other apps with lots of data handle this problem.

• Apps such as the Apple Photos app, Google Drive, and Flighty provided inspiration on filtering and different ways of structuring data such as by year or team where the injury happened.

• Fitness apps and medical websites such as Fitbod and WebMD provided inspiration for filtering data by body part.

🛠️ Design Approach

Structuring the Data

Allowed players to filter their medical data by:

• Season

• Team

• Body part

• Chronological order

This allowed players to seamlessly move between a career-level overview and specific injury details.

🎨 Visual Branding

• Unlike the staff apps which were focused on efficiency and clean UIs, the goal with the visual branding for this app was to be bolder and feel premium to feel appropriate for the athlete persona.

• Looking at apps in the sports area we decided on a strong, bold typeface for an athletic, professional feel that players were familiar with.

• As team colours and branding are very important in the lives of professional athletes we chose to brand the app with the player’s current team branding for active players and NBA branding for retired players.

⛕ Core Flows

• Home Page: quick access to current issues and recent updates

• Timeline View: structured navigation through decades of medical records

• Injury & Treatment Records: detailed entries with filtering for precision

• Sharing Flow: simple pathways to securely share records with doctors or teams

✅ Final Solution

The result was a mobile app that allows active and retired NBA players to:

• Access and search their entire medical history with ease

• Filter by season, team, or body part for rapid navigation

• Review detailed injury and treatment records across their careers

• Share records securely when moving between teams or seeking medical care

👥 Collaboration & Role

• My Contributions: Led the design of the medical history section, home page, and overall visual brand identity

• Collaboration: Partnered closely with the other designer, product manager, and engineering team

• Process: Conducted weekly reviews with leadership to refine direction and ensure alignment with NBA requirements

🧠 Key Learnings

• Designing for large, sensitive datasets requires balancing clarity and security

• Familiar consumer app patterns can make complex medical data feel approachable

• Under tight deadlines, focusing on high-impact features (filters, timelines, dashboards) delivered the most value