NRL My League App
How might we simplify navigation and personalise the experience for users balancing multiple roles within the grassroots rugby league ecosystem?
The National Rugby League MyLeague app is a grassroots rugby league platform designed to support players, parents, coaches, referees, and local communities by providing access to fixtures, results, team management, news, and club information.
This UX redesign project explored how users interacted with the platform and identified opportunities to improve navigation, personalisation, and overall usability.
Working within a team environment through Harness Projects, the project focused on simplifying the experience for users managing multiple roles within the rugby league ecosystem, while creating a more intuitive and engaging community-focused digital experience.
Client / National Rugby League + Harness Projects
Date / 2023
My Skillset
UX Design
Research & Discovery
Insights & Synthesis
Prototyping &Testing
My
Method
This project combined UX research and service design thinking to better understand the needs, frustrations and behaviours of grassroots rugby league users. Existing user feedback and reviews were analysed alongside competitor research and heuristic evaluation to identify where friction was occurring throughout the experience.
Research activities included:
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Competitor analysis across sports and community-based mobile platforms
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Heuristic evaluation of the existing MyLeague experience
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User journey mapping to identify pain points and moments of friction
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Jobs-to-be-Done analysis to better understand user motivations and behavioural needs
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Interaction flow mapping across onboarding, navigation and content discovery experiences
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Review and synthesis of existing research findings and community feedback
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Exploration of behavioural patterns across players, parents, coaches and referees
A strong focus was placed on understanding the overlapping needs of users balancing multiple roles within the grassroots ecosystem, particularly where quick access to relevant information was essential.
Insights gathered throughout the process informed the development of low-fidelity concepts, user flows and high-fidelity interface proposals focused on onboarding, homepage personalisation and improving continuity between internal and external content experiences.
The final design direction was supported through iterative prototyping and usability-focused refinements, resulting in a more streamlined, immersive and user-centred mobile experience.
“I’m involved in rugby league in a few different ways, sometimes I’m a player, other times I’m helping as a parent or coach - but the app treats me like I’m only one kind of person. I just want to switch between roles easily and quickly find the information that actually matters to me without digging through everything.”
Insights
Research revealed that users were often overwhelmed by the amount of content presented within the app, particularly when trying to quickly locate information relevant to their specific role.
Existing navigation patterns lacked clarity and personalisation, creating unnecessary friction during common tasks such as viewing team updates, training content and community news.
The onboarding experience also introduced barriers early in the journey, with sign-in and account creation flows feeling overly rigid and interruptive.
Users wanted greater flexibility, faster access to content and more control over what appeared on their homepage experience.
Another recurring issue involved external links redirecting users away from the app environment entirely, creating a disconnected experience that reduced immersion and interrupted engagement.
These findings shaped the direction of the redesign, with a focus on continuity, simplification and user-driven personalisation.
Outcomes &
Deliverables
The final outcome was a high-fidelity redesign proposal demonstrating how the MyLeague experience could become more intuitive, flexible and engaging for grassroots users.
The redesign introduced a simplified onboarding process, customisable homepage categories and an in-app overlay system for external content to improve continuity and reduce disruption.
The project also explored how tailored content experiences could better support users managing multiple roles within the rugby league ecosystem.
Navigation structures were refined to improve discoverability, while interaction patterns were designed to create a more streamlined and immersive mobile experience.
Deliverables included UX research synthesis, journey mapping, heuristic analysis, Jobs-to-be-Done frameworks, low-fidelity ideation, interaction flows, high-fidelity prototypes and developer handover documentation supporting implementation thinking and interface consistency.
“The new sign-in process just felt way easier to use. I liked that I could set the app up around the stuff I actually care about instead of digging through heaps of content that wasn’t relevant to me. It felt a lot more personalised and just made the whole app easier to navigate.”
