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 produces research constantly. New material developments, body-data scans, thermal maps. ATLAS turned that stream into stories apparel and footwear designers could actually use, in a format that reads fast.
(B) GOALS
Make research legible, keep it connected, prove every decision.
The labs produce dense output: body-data scans, thermal maps, material studies. Designers don’t have time to parse raw metrics. So each insight became a story rather than a report, structured so the findings that actually change a design decision surface first.
What happened after the story mattered just as much. Someone reading about sweat mapping should reach the underlying data in one move, so every narrative carried visual cues and calls to action that led somewhere real. I was the sole UX designer next to one developer. Research backed every decision. That’s what made it defensible when mine was the only design voice in the room.
(C) PROCESS
Every story started as a map.
Every story started as a user flow. How would a designer move through a chapter like “Keep Her Cool,” from sweat management to thermal perception, before anyone drew a screen? Getting that mapping right is what put the most useful findings in front of designers working on a specific demographic.
(D) FEEDBACK ROUNDS
Testing reshaped the product three ways.
Between releases I ran user interviews and moderated testing with the designers actually using ATLAS. Those sessions set the priorities. Chapter cards were the primary path into any story, and they weren’t pulling the attention they needed, so I raised their visibility and gave them more context around them. Designers kept reaching for related maps and highlights mid-chapter, so related-content links went at the bottom of every chapter to save them a trip back to browse.
The third change was structural. Designers kept losing their place inside longer stories, so I rebuilt the side navigation to expose a story’s chapters and let them jump straight to a section. Nothing shipped until a follow-up round validated it. Small evidenced adjustments, one after another.
(E) RESULTS
USERS WITHIN MONTHS OF LAUNCH
Testing and interviews shaped ATLAS into something designers opened every day. As teams across Nike HQ onboarded, the user base grew roughly 15×, turning a tool a few people had heard of into part of how Sportswear designs footwear and apparel.
(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. Working against the clock taught me which shortcuts are safe.
( 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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