CASE STUDY (01) ✦ NIKE ✦ 2021 – 2022
Giving Nike’s apparel and footwear designers the user insights to shape the future of Sportswear.
ROLE
Lead Product Designer
TEAM
Design ×1 — Dev ×1 — 3D ×1
SCOPE
UX Research · Product Design · Design System
TIMELINE
2021 – 2022
(A) CONTEXT
Innovation at Nike HQ moved faster than designers could absorb it.
Nike’s World Headquarters generates a constant stream of research — new material developments, body-data scans, thermal maps. ATLAS was built to translate that stream into stories and insights that apparel and footwear designers could actually use, in a format that’s easy to digest.
(B) GOALS
Make research legible, keep it connected, prove every decision.
ATLAS had one job above all: take the dense output of Nike’s sport-research labs — body-data scans, thermal maps, material studies — and make it legible at a glance for designers who don’t have time to parse raw metrics. That meant stepping away from traditional information-gathering formats and treating each insight as a story, structured so the most decision-relevant findings surface first.
Just as important was what happened after the story. A designer reading about sweat mapping should reach the underlying contextual data in one move, so every narrative was designed with deliberate visual cues and calls to action instead of dead ends. And because I was the sole UX designer working alongside a single developer, I committed to backing each decision with user research — when you’re the only design voice in the room, evidence is what earns trust.
(C) PROCESS
Every story started as a map.
Each ATLAS story began with the user flow: how a designer would move through chapters like “Keep Her Cool” — from sweat management to thermal perception — before a single screen was designed. Getting the mapping right meant designers reached the most crucial information first when designing for a specific demographic.
(D) FEEDBACK ROUNDS
Testing reshaped the product three ways.
I ran recurring feedback rounds with the designers using ATLAS — user interviews and moderated testing between releases — and let those sessions, not intuition, set the priorities. Chapter cards, the primary path into any story, weren’t earning the attention their importance demanded, so I raised their visibility and gave them more surrounding context. Designers also kept reaching for related maps, stories, and highlights mid-chapter, so quick related-content links were added at the bottom of every chapter instead of forcing a trip back to browse.
The third change was structural. Designers struggled to orient themselves inside longer stories, so I redesigned the side navigation to expose a story’s chapters and let users jump directly to specific areas. Each change shipped only after a follow-up round validated it — small, evidenced adjustments over big unvalidated swings.
(E) RESULTS
USERS WITHIN MONTHS OF LAUNCH
Feedback from user testing and interviews shaped ATLAS into a product footwear and apparel designers used daily. As more teams across Nike HQ onboarded, the user base grew roughly 15× — from a tool a few teams knew about to a daily part of how Sportswear teams design.
(F) REFLECTIONS
( 1 )
FIGURING IT OUT
As the solo UX designer, self-managing and navigating next steps on my own became the job inside the job.
( 2 )
GATHERING INFORMATION
User interviews and testing drove every validated change — and time constraints taught me which shortcuts are safe to take.
( 3 )
FUTURE THINKING
A brief engagement, but the explorations left behind were ready to implement for the next generation of ATLAS.
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