Forty-seven tournaments, one front door
The European Tour is never off air. While one tournament finishes in Dubai, another is being set up in Johannesburg. The site has to carry live leaderboards, video replays, galleries, player profiles, and up-to-the-minute articles — at once, every week of the year.
During play, all of that breadth collapses into one question fans ask over and over: what's the score now? Treat the leaderboard as one content module among many and you have already lost. Treat it as the reason the site exists, and every other decision starts to order itself.
The leaderboard set the hierarchy
The brief we were given was blunt: serve fans the first and fastest live scores on the web. We took that as the design constraint, not a marketing line — which meant the leaderboard won every layout argument it entered.
Live scores took the prime position on tournament pages, and replays, galleries, player profiles, and articles were designed to hang off the leaderboard rather than compete with it. Where an editorial module would have pushed scores down the page, the scores stayed and the module moved.
A scoreboard is also the worst place for visual invention. Fans scan it dozens of times a day, so it had to be boring in the best sense: instantly readable, identical in behaviour everywhere it appeared.
A system so live data never waits on design
I led a visual and UX team across the key pages in five intensive two-week sprints — interviewing stakeholders, refining ideas, and presenting wireframes and flows to the client throughout, not as a reveal at the end.
The design system was what made the speed thesis hold at scale. A shared component library meant leaderboard, score, and player components had one implementation everywhere, so a new tournament page was assembly, not a fresh design debate. We prototyped the interactions — from micro-interactions to full page flows — and delivered annotated, production-ready design straight into the client's Sitecore build.
Forty-seven tournaments a year leaves no room for a design team in the critical path. The system took us out of it.
What live audiences teach you
The finished site puts real-time leaderboards beside replays, galleries, profiles, and live articles, so a fan can follow a Sunday back nine as it happens rather than after it has.
The takeaway for anyone building for live audiences: identify the one thing your users refresh for, and make everything else negotiable. Speed is not an engineering afterthought to a design. For the fan hitting refresh on the 18th green, speed is the design.
