Hollie Bracewell
Rugby Australia wanted to reimagine Rugby Xplorer. An app bringing together news, scores, teams, competitions, and player information for the whole rugby community. The existing version had gotten away from itself. It was visually dated, structurally confusing, and missing features the audience needed. The brief was essentially a ground-up rethink.
I was the sole designer on the project, working alongside Eastwood.
What I was figuring out
The audience is genuinely broad — fans, grassroots players, officials, club administrators — all using the same app for different reasons. The product only works if it feels relevant to whoever's using it, so onboarding was the first thing I focused on. Not as a welcome screen but as the thing that sets the whole experience up. You pick the teams, players, and competitions you want to follow and favourite one as your home base. Skip it and come back later.
Colour was the other problem worth mentioning. Professional teams get their own theme: a gradient and an accent colour pulled from the team brand. Other teams and player profiles run on Rugby Australia navy, with the logo doing the work. Simple rule, but it took a while to land on it.
What I took from it
The complexity of a project like this is easy to underestimate from the outside. One app, one sport, but the range of people using it and the number of contexts it needed to work across made almost every decision harder than it looked. What I'm most proud of is that the end result still feels simple to use. That's usually where most of the work is hidden.
