FIRE+: Designing for Shifting Fan Motivation
NFL fandom is dynamic. The same person can want very different things from football depending on the time of year, their team’s performance, the platform they’re using, the people around them, and even the time of day.
Traditional personas and audience segments were too static for that reality. They described types of fans, but they didn’t always help teams decide what a specific experience needed to deliver in a specific moment.
For NFL Media, that meant evaluating each experience by the fan need it served. Stats products could lean into expertise. Fantasy could balance expertise with friendship. Team experiences could carry more identity. Social content could emphasize recreation. The framework helped teams make practical decisions about product strategy, content density, team-brand presence, and tone of voice across the NFL ecosystem.
Key Results
Moved beyond static personas
Created a flexible behavioral model that reflected how fan needs shift across seasonality, team performance, platform context, and usage moments.Connected research to experience strategy
Gave teams a shared language for deciding how much an experience should emphasize identity, expertise, entertainment, friendship, or aspiration.Improved cross-functional product decisions
Helped Product, Design, Research, and Content teams align around experience intent, from stats and fantasy to club products, social content, and league-wide storytelling.
FIRE+ was built around a more flexible idea: fan behavior is driven by shifting needs. The framework was loosely inspired by Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef’s theory of Fundamental Human Needs, which distinguishes between stable human needs and the different ways people satisfy them across contexts and cultures.
This gave Product, Design, Research, and Content teams a practical way to shape experience decisions. Stats-heavy products could lean into expertise. Fantasy could balance expertise with friendship. Team and club experiences could carry more identity. Casual social content could emphasize recreation. Player-led lifestyle content could serve aspiration.
The value was not putting every fan into a box. It was understanding that fan desire changes by context. A highly knowledgeable fan may want dense analytics on Tuesday morning, emotional hype before kickoff, social trash talk during a fantasy matchup, and pure entertainment late Sunday night.
FIRE helped teams make better decisions about content density, brand presence, tone of voice, feature priority, and the role of team identity across the NFL digital ecosystem.
