The Kansas City Chiefs had never been to a Super Bowl in Nathan Brunzie’s lifetime, let alone during his six years working for his hometown team.
So when the Chiefs defeated the Tennessee Titans to win the AFC Championship at Arrowhead Stadium this past January, advancing to the franchise’s first Super Bowl in 50 years, Brunzie knew he wanted to do something special for the team’s mobile app.
As the club’s digital media manager, Brunzie oversaw a wealth of content in the weeks leading up to the “big game” in Miami, and his content team had big plans for wall-to-wall coverage the day of Super Bowl LIV, too. But would fans find it all, in addition to all of the real-time content they might want to follow along during the game?
And that’s when the Chiefs “game-day hub” was born.
“I just wanted to try to get a one-stop-shop for our fans during the game,” Brunzie described during a recent episode of the YinzCast. “Whether it be the highlight videos that we’re putting out throughout the game – that’s our main piece of the content during the game – to stats that your die-hard fans are more interested in; I just wanted it to be front and center.
“On a normal, regular-season game, I would say if you open the app and you’re at your house, it’s just your highlight videos, it’s just the content feed. There’s not really a section for stats. You’ve got to click around to find that section. So I just wanted to put everything about the game in one easy place for fans to go see it.”
Upon throwing out his idea, YinzCam’s team of developers and designers caught the ball and punched it into the end zone.
“Their design team did a great job with a quick turnaround to produce something for me that looked great and functioned well,” Brunzie said. “I was very impressed by how much they could actually do… live scores, live stats, live scoring players were all filtering in. And to turn all that around as quickly as they did, just kudos to them.”
Having studied graphic design in college, prior to teaching himself web design and programming, Brunzie has a soft spot for way digital channels look and function. Which is why he puts so much focus on the look and layout of the Chiefs’ app, continually making changes and improvements through our cards platform.
“I think it’s very important,” he said of the design. “One of my keys is ease of use. I mean, UI and UX design, to me, is really important and the fan-journey to find information in the app is really important. If you can make that as easy as possible, from getting from point A to point B, that’s the goal, right? I mean, it shouldn’t be complicated to find anything in the app, maybe a couple of clicks. So that’s kind of my goal with how I’ve structured the app and all the cards I have set up.
“Along with that comes the design of each specific card and the legibility of that. Right now, I have it where each one has an icon associated with the title on the card. So it’s kind of a visual and a written cue. So I hope fans like it.”
For more insight into the Chiefs’ mobile strategy and stories from Brunzie’s Super Bowl experience, just search YinzCast in your favorite podcast app, or click here to listen online.