Sony: Tailgate
Role: UX Researcher & Product Designer
Near future product design capstone project sponsored by Sony Electronics. Created for the future of the live at-home sports watching experience.
*MS HCDE 2026 Capstone Showcase - Creativity Award Winner
6-month
Project Timeline
10 participants
25-45yo, watches sports casually
2 feedback sessions
Including a moderation co-design
Tooling: Miro, Google Forms, Figma, TinkerCAD, 3D Printer
Project Brief
Sony has always been at the forefront of creating excellent sports-watching experiences. From creating some of the best TVs for watching sports to partnering with some of the best sports leagues, we strive to create the best fan experience. How can we take this experience to the next level by creating even more immersive sports-watching experiences in the home? Any solution should be multimodal and applicable to different sports, space constraints, personal interests, and limitations (monetary, physical disabilities, etc.)
Problem Space: The current sports-watching fandom and market as it stands today caters primarily to the avid fan and technology keeps refining the broadcast — bigger screens, sharper resolution, deeper stats and analysis. However, for casual fans, this doesn’t have any appeal. Casual fans are left with knowledge gaps, passive viewing and second screen habits, they feel disconnected from the energy of the room and just overall miss the context of most games.
How can Sony improve the sports-watching experience to be more immersive for at-home live sports-watching fans?
Research Questions
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What do casual sports fans value when watching sports at home?
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What do they engage with? When would they want this information?
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How do they decide on which games to watch?
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What moments cause disconnect from the group or broadcast?
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How might the in-person social aspect play a role in the experience?
Project Context
Sony had minimal constraints so we started out research with a broad overview of the current competitive landscape of immersive sports-watching technologies. Utilizing AI tools like Perplexity and ChatGPT to pull consumer sentiment from social media outlets like Reddit, and conducted field observations via our social circles during the Super Bowl. I looked at additional market trend reports and academic articles on audience and fan theory. An article from WGSN regarding the market trends for the casual fan illustrated an opportunity to sharpen our scope to this target audience.
For Sony, a digital product would be a lighter lift and more accessible to fans through multimodal integration. The idea was to deviate from Sony’s traditional hardware approach to a digital product that would meet the casual fan and eventually grow with them as they become avid fans – creating market growth.
Recruitment & Panel Management
This was a mutli-phase research project, requiring participant recruitment and management for both generative and evaluative research.
Generative-Phase: Participants were recruited by setting up physical and digital flyers on and around Seattle that linked to our Google Forms. Because of the nature of our recruitment criteria our participant pool quickly skewed more woman-identifying than man-identifying. In order to have an equal gender mix, I reached out to our personal contacts for participation.
Evaluative-Phase: Our understanding of this consumer evolved and so we chose five participants we believed to fit the behaviors of a casual fan to be our consumer archetype. After developing our low and mid-fidelity prototype, we reached back out to these participants to conduct a co-design and feedback session.
Methods & Strategy
We limited our recruitment to casual viewers of football and basketball to narrow our focus. This worked well since our project was conducted in between the Super Bowl, Winter Olympics, and March Madness. Sporting events that garner a lot of media attention.
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In-depth interview data was used to define a casual fan based on their lack of spending behavior, and what they value when watching sports at home.
From our screener survey, we made a considerable effort to pick a mix of genders to interview. Participants were chosen by watching habits, self-reported understanding of a sport (football and basketball), and at-home watching set up.
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*It is possible that men-identifying survey responders over-indexed their understanding of sports strategy, while women-identifying responders under-indexed their self-reported understanding of sports strategy.
Analysis & Themes
1. Sports watching is a social and community-building event.
Participant 1: “I think if I go over to a friend’s house, it’s more about the social aspect of hanging out and watching together. There’s nothing really about the TV or the room setup. It’s more just that we know each other, we like hanging out, so we watch together.”
Participant 10: “Especially when it’s my own city’s team, it gives me almost a way of finding identity — in a group.”
2. Viewing is a passive act and audiences will direct their attention to other activities.
Participant 5: “If we’re cooking dinner or cleaning up, doing the dishes, I feel like I’m doing some task while the game is going on.”
Participant 4: “If I’m alone, I’m unlikely to spend much time watching a whole game, but I might watch a whole game with people who are also excited about it.”
3. Knowledge gaps create friction which leads to less engagement.
Participant 9: “That hockey example gave me more context for something I’d been confused about — like, ‘Why did they just give up two goals immediately after one another?’”
Participant 7: “The entry cost of understanding all of the information it’d take to enjoy a particular game is massive.”
The findings influenced the design principles: enable socialization, intentional interruption, fostering the sense of community, and encourage shared experiences.
Ideation & Design
Five participants embodied the archetype of our target user, whose quotes we could look back on to ground our ideas into real context. Using HMW and viewer story brainstorming methods to ideate on possible solutions, justifying how the scenario would play out in the context of a game day. Ideas were categorized under ‘passive’ and ‘active’ based on the viewer’s level of interaction with the product.
Industry feedback provided us insight into how current and past products traditionally occupy space and interactions on the screen. As a result, we pushed our solution off the screen as a projection instead.
A low-fidelity prototype made from large sheets of paper allowed us to easily edit, mark up, and iterate on the design. It helped us realize a physical component was needed to act as the projecting mechanism. Using quick-dry foam we created organic shapes that would compliment the home space, in-hand feeling, and facilitate intentional interactions.
To ensure the validity of our solution we conducted a co-design session to get feedback on the mid-fidelity prototype, learn what content people would be interested in seeing during a game (and outside of the game), and the potential UI.
We invited three participants back for our co-design session with the following question to solve: What content can we provide casual sports viewers during social settings that will keep them engaged and encourage interpersonal socializing? I moderated the three activities; concept-feedback on the mid-fidelity prototype, feature prioritization game, and scenario walk-through/interaction points.
Using the KANO method we evaluated what features participants viewed as the threshold for the product, product attributes, and possible excitement factors.
The takeaways to create our minimal viable product (MVP) by prioritizing the information and the interactions for viewers and understanding desire for these features: contextualizing the game, intentional interaction, social connection and celebration, customizable and modular design interaction, and localization with inclusion.
Development
Our final solution was to de-silo the second screen experience and provide access to the information around the TV for casual fans. For the casual fan, the barrier of entry for this product needed to be as low as possible in order to get engagement.
Since our product was more passive in nature, I voiced concern that the design was not a big enough differentiation from the already hands-off experience casual fans have and pushed for more interaction. In response a tap interaction to opt-into the chat feature and AirPlay from the viewer’s mobile device in order to share content.
MVP integration
User flow brainstorming
3D print testing
Final Product
The Sony Tailgate is an AI-powered, companion projection that works with any live sports broadcast.
The product layers contextual, on-demand information alongside the game. Answering, what just happened and why should I care? without demanding constant attention or changing the feel of the game.
The scoreboard grounds the audience to the game, while panels on the side of the screen are modular and customizable to the information and experiences that viewers want.
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Sony Tailgate
A product that meets the audience where they’re at and can be customizable to the people in the room. The Sony Tailgate is designed to foster community and enhance socialization.
Features like a tap interaction with a physical device gives viewers the autonomy to opt-into the experience or keeps them in the moment with the people around them. Never interrupting the natural flow of conversation while keeping everyone connected.
Reflection
The lack of product roadmap taught me how to look at broad market trends and larger consumer sentiment across different social platforms. It showed me how to anchor my academic research into an emerging behavior to build the product strategy and design the research plan and execution.
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Sony’s original brief did not have AI as a requirement, and was touched on towards the end of the project. Incorporation of artificial intelligence (AI) in this project was a mindful decision. By using it for proposed features such as the context cards and gameplay explanation where timely and accurate information is key. Since viewers have a limited window to consume and react to the content on the TV and the social context in the room, having the speed of AI was the best way to integrate it.