The sports onboarding teardown.
18 sports app onboarding flows, every screen documented.
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What you get
All 18 flows screen by screen, the 6 rules, and a recommended flow for each of the three segments.
What we ran the teardown with. Point them at your own vertical.
The screen-by-screen data the findings were read from.
What the flows do
Sports onboarding is building a filter, and almost nothing else.
- 1.Which sport or league?
- 2.Which teams and players?
- 3.What should we tell you about, and when?
Everything downstream is a feed, so the whole flow exists to decide what goes into it. That is why the best ones ask for so little, and why the ones that gate on an account first end up with both an empty feed and no preference data from the people who walked away.
Defer registration until you have shown something real
If personalization runs on the user's preferences, show them a personalized result first, then ask for the account. The Athletic and FotMob both ask their personalization questions before the account screen appears.
Frame notifications as a choice, not a permission
Put it after the user has already told you what they care about. The NBA app lets you pick alert categories for the team you just followed. theScore asks which notifications you want only once teams are chosen.
Make a minors compliance step mandatory and plain
Never optional, never easy to skip. Sideline HD asks directly whether any players on the team are under 13, as one of its core questions rather than an aside.
Match how much you ask to what the person is doing
Someone browsing a feed has near-zero patience. Someone setting up a team already expects it to take a few minutes. GameChanger asks 8 questions and MaxPreps 7, the two longest flows in the set, because both are building a roster and a schedule.
If you are going to ask a routing question, ask it first
Do not collect five other things and then ask the one question that should have shaped them. AthletesGoLive asks the user type as its very first question.
Put marketing-only questions last, or cut them
The Athletic is the only app in the set that asks how the user heard about it, and it comes after the paywall and account creation, the very last step before the home screen.
I've already done some of this work. I do it for my consulting business, I have all the teardowns, and I've done the work that other people don't have to do.
Want this run on your app?
The teardown is the category. An onboarding audit reads your flow, screen by screen.
See the onboarding audit