SailGP is adrenaline-fueled sailboat racing as rival national teams go head-to-head in venues around the world for a winner-takes-all prize. Using state-of-the-art technology, athletes fly cutting-edge wingsailed catamarans in thrilling close-to-shore races.

Introduced for SailGP Season 2, the Impact League tracks the positive actions teams make to reduce their overall carbon footprint and help accelerate inclusivity in sailing. Results are shown on a second leaderboard that runs alongside the Season Championship, and monitors the Impact League performance of teams, with each team's individual race score from every SailGP event being added to the overall Impact League leaderboard.

SailGP's Impact League has a set of sustainability categories – social and environmental – to operate against with each team awarded points based on its fulfilment of specific criteria within each category. The criteria range from pioneering new technologies focusing on clean energy solutions and removing all single-use plastics, to diversity and inclusion and using the team's voice for good.

As the Lead Content Designer and Strategist on an integrated design team, I worked closely with our UX/UI designers to establish a thoughtful content hierarchy, ensuring that it would integrate with their existing content management system and require minimal manual intervention and governance. To help them understand this, I created a content map to help SailGP know which sections they would need to focus on as the season progressed and their program expanded, which was purely driven by data, and which was updated from external sources.

In less than four weeks, we delivered two rounds of wireframes, initial designs, clickable high-fidelity prototypes and final designs for both desktop and mobile, blending what we learned from research with feedback from the SailGP team.

Sustainability was a key part, not only of SailGP’s initiative, but of our approach to the project in general. We adhered to sustainable design practices throughout, and delivered an experience that is both future-proof and kinder to the planet.

As part of a larger ongoing relationship, we were tasked with helping to make the Impact League a more prominent, engaging experience for teams and fans. To do this, we connected with SailGP through team calls and workshops to explore SailGP's ambitions. 

We conducted a series of collaborative workstreams and workshops to immerse ourselves in SailGP's organisation and understand its users with the aim of identifying the right data to surface and interface to develop to create truly engaging experience. 

Content was key to introducing interactivity, team and fan engagement elements, and additional clarity around the Impact League and it's scoring criteria, all with ensuring that what we delivered was focused on sustainable digital practices, such as reusable text, reduced word count, and more evergreen content.