Nike Sport Research Lab, Form

After my revised consult designs were in use, 17 athletes at one mobile lab event filled out a survey: 14 promoters, 3 passives, and no detractors, an NPS of about +82.

Athletes said the consult was personal and informative, and some said the recommendations helped them run a race more efficiently. Product said the work improved the athlete experience and the scalability of the platform, and they were proud of it.

What I designed

Consumer-facing

• Consult booking
• In-person consult app
• Post-run reports and takeaways
• Athlete web portal with personalization, run history, and comparative data

Admin tools

• System Control App
• Consolidated appointment and queue management
• Treadmill calibration
• On-site operator tools

What I led

• UX and UI across all consumer-facing experiences and enterprise operator tools and apps
• Cross-functional alignment and design representation working closely with leadership, product, science, innovation, and engineering

The opportunity

I joined the innovation team at the Nike Sport Research Lab to update Form’s post-run takeaway report with new brand work. The brand guidelines had no digital specs and didn’t account for accessibility.

As I got to know the project, I saw that Form needed more than a new look. The problems reached well past the report, and the whole offering needed work to meet the product standard athletes expect from Nike.

Working in the NSRL was an amazing opportunity, and I wanted to show the team how much we could improve, and how fast.

Initial Form PDF report brand revision work

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Initial Form PDF report brand revision work

01/08

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Before / After 01/08

Initial Form PDF report brand revision work

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Initial Form PDF report brand revision work

01/08

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Before / After 01/08

As part of my early research, I worked a mobile lab event and documented the high-level steps an athlete went through, along with the problems I saw at each one. I turned that into a simple service flow diagram the team could read in a quick meeting.

It showed one of the bigger needs: the athlete’s path through the whole visit. Improving those touchpoints would fix more than the user flow. It would improve the full service flow and the experience as a whole.

Service flow and high-level issues diagram

Service flow observations

Fit

As I showed the team what wasn’t working and what better design could add, I learned about the features already on the roadmap, including better appointment booking, personalization, international rollouts, and an athlete web portal. Most had already been pitched to leadership and were being built, but no product designer was involved.

I delivered the report redesign, and the team loved it. So did leadership, and so did the athletes. My contract was extended. Now I had to figure out how to seize the opportunity.

Constraints

Form was built by scientists and engineers as a proof of concept, so there was no design process to plug into. The team was excited to bring design into the fold, but I still had to earn buy-in before any of the development work could happen.

Booking, personalization, the web portal, and the international rollouts were already pitched to leadership and being built. Development budgets and timelines were tight, and leadership expected to see features roll out, not wait on a redesign. Whatever I proposed had to fit around work already in motion.

It also had to hold up in the US, the UK, China, and Japan, with more countries on the way, so the consult and report had to work in other languages, starting with Chinese.

The team didn’t want a traditional design process. To them, long discovery, documentation, and new rounds of research and testing looked like delays.

I had to start designing immediately, so I leaned on past experience and best practices. As I worked on the service, talked to people, and learned more about the product, I brought more structure to the work and started improving more of the experience.

And the deeper I got into the service, the more tools I found behind a single visit, each one adding a little more friction for the athlete.

Tool set

Tool set

Fit

Jobs to be done capture

Jobs to be done

Fit

Decisions

Fixing the experience one feature at a time

I tied UX and UI fixes to features already on the roadmap, starting with the consult and the athlete report, then booking and the athlete web portal. Along the way, I gathered informal feedback from athlete surveys and met with operators from time to time to hear what was working, so each feature shipped a little closer to the long-term vision.

From data dump to takeaway

The first was the consult and the athlete report. Form captures six metrics, and the system picks one to focus on, the one where change would have the most measurable impact.

Around it, the consult puts a lot in front of athletes at once: run data and video with shape overlays, running drills and workouts, a footwear profile with shoe recommendations, and more. Athletes left with a takeaway report, but they had no way to look back at past runs or see if they were improving.

Over time, I improved the report with clearer data visualization, consistent content blocks from the design system I built, and UX best practices. We eventually brought it online in the athlete web portal, where athletes could see every report and compare their data against previous runs.

Interim consult app and athlete report

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Interim consult app and athlete report

01/08

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Key factors 01/08

Interim consult app and athlete report

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Interim consult app and athlete report

01/06

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Form shape 01/06

1. 01 Form shape
2. 02 Form profile
3. 03 Form focus
4. 04 Drills and workouts
5. 05 Footwear profile
6. 06 Footwear recommendations

Booking flow and athlete web portal

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Booking flow and athlete web portal

01/08

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About 01/08

1. 01 About
2. 02 Schedule
3. 03 Pick a date and time
4. 04 Fill out registration
5. 05 Visit booked
6. 06 Your reports
7. 07 Individual report
8. 08 Resources

The service is the architecture

The operator tools came last. One visit ran across several disconnected apps, and the problems reached athletes.

At the mobile lab, about half of them couldn’t get the QR code check-in to work, so operators checked them in by hand and spent a lot of time helping with their phones. Appointment times and check-ins weren’t clear, so athletes could be served out of order, like a 2 p.m. doctor’s appointment where the 3 p.m. patient showed up early and went in first.

Operators already knew the service by heart, so I modeled one System Control App on that flow. The service became the architecture.

Check-In, Capture, and Consult sat at the core, with Calibration and Settings beside them. Check-in, the finished run, and the finished consult each moved an athlete through the queue. The steps were ones they already knew, so the app was easier mid-service and needed little onboarding.

I worked it out with the service designer, product, and the coaches, then built the prototype in Cursor with Figma and FigJam connected. It was the first time AI was part of a production workflow on the team.

App architecture

App architecture

Fit

Evolving the Workflow

AI tooling came late to Nike. Around the time of this project, Nike opened the door for individuals to start experimenting with Copilot and Cursor. I saw this as a great opportunity to learn and jumped on it.

As I became more familiar with the tools, specifically Cursor, I began folding AI into my whole workflow. I found it game-changing and became an advocate and liaison for my design partners.

My design manager asked me to pilot a new workflow, with Form as the first project, and share how it was going. I started delivering Form work to my product and engineering partners through Git and a local, behind-the-firewall web server. This became the team’s preferred way of working.

Learnings

Showing results quickly mattered more than any document. Each improvement that shipped made the case for the next one, and that’s how a reskin turned into two and a half years of work across the consult, the report, booking, the portal, and the operator tools.

My contract ended in August 2026, during Nike’s restructuring, before the System Control App reached release. With more time, I would have shipped it, tested it with operators after release, and kept improving it.