Boosting live engagement through live scoreboards, reaching over 1.2 million monthly readers across baseball subreddits.
Role
Product Designer
Timeline
8 weeks, 2025
Team
Product Designers, Developers, Project Managers
OVERVIEW
My Impact
• Designed and launched Reddit's first interactive MLB scoreboard experience
• Incorporated real-time, in-platform updates to r/MLB and similar subreddits
• Enhanced fan interaction without redirecting them off Reddit
RESEARCH
How can we enhance the fan experience in Major League Baseball threads?
Among over 500 million active accounts and 100k+ active communities, sports are one of Reddit’s most popular and fastest-growing interest groups where fans chat and keep up with live games through the subreddits.
Reddit's existing partnerships with major sports leagues have already proven to enhance engagement in football, basketball, soccer, and cricket communities.
Our goal was to bring this same real-time, interactive experience to MLB fans, meeting their desire for instant scores, stats, and game updates within the r/MLB community and related subreddits.
Evaluating the competitor scoreboard standards
We knew our scoreboard modules would be broken down into three phases: pre-game, live, and post-game. By researching MLB.com, ESPN, and Yahoo Sports, I identified different ways of presenting various information.
Structuring content across game phases
Within each of these three phases, I sorted information based on our 4 main tabs: summary, play-by-play, stats, and box score. I worked backwards to organize overlapping information vs. distinct information across the three phases, following existing mental models based on existing baseball scoreboards.
FINAL DESIGNS
Pre-game
• Prediction polls encourage active participants and drive early engagement within the thread.
• Keeps fans up to date with info on pitching matchups, lineups, standings, and game time.
Live Game
• Allows users to view the score with real-time inning, outs, play-by-plays, scoring plays, and box score.
• Keeps fans on Reddit while experiencing the live game and being able to chat in threads.
Post-game
• Provide an archive and extensive overview of all game stats.
• Allows users to catch up on missed details.
• Responsive desktop designs ensured the stat tables would be formatted correctly on different breakpoints.
DESIGN DECISIONS
Community prediction poll
Users can participate in community prediction polls to build pre-game anticipation and drive active engagement before live play begins.
Adaptive tables
Users can page to the left and right on mobile for dense tables like the box score. This was necessary to accomodate for the number of scores while keeping even spacing.
Simplified visualization
The baseball diamond provides immediate visual recognition of game status, reducing cognitive load while tracking live progress.
Nested navigation controls
The navigation controls are placed at the bottom for reachability where users can toggle and page up and down to view different teams and more records.
NEXT STEPS
Evaluating impact and beta testing results
Our MLB scoreboard module is now being beta-tested in various baseball subreddits.
REFLECTION
Challenges
01 Designing within Reddit’s ecosystem
We had to get creative with how we presented complex, dynamic data like live scores and game stats within a limited UI toolkit, all while making it feel native to Reddit’s ecosystem.
02 Handling dense tables on mobile
Meticulously analyzing current scoreboards and using our information architecture was essential in content planning and helping determine where and what tabs were needed, and what navigation controls needed real estate.
