Daily Deck

Home Page View of Daily Deck
Back of Card
Front of Card
Daily Deck Completion
Deck Opening

Elevator pitch

Daily Deck turns ESPN’s personalization signals into a daily pack of athlete stories, helping fans discover who to root for next.

Inspiration

ESPN makes it easy for fans to keep up with the teams and athletes they already love. However, its personalization primarily reinforces those existing preferences, limiting opportunities to discover new athletes and expand their fandom.

For the next generation of sports fans, who increasingly discover interests through personalized, short-form experiences, we saw an opportunity to make sports discovery more intentional.

We asked:

What if ESPN could use what it already knows about a fan to help them discover who they might love next?

That question inspired Daily Deck.

What it does

Daily Deck is a personalized athlete-discovery experience that delivers three player cards based on each fan’s viewing interests.

Each deck balances:

A familiar athlete who establishes relevance
An adjacent athlete connected to the fan’s interests
An unexpected athlete who expands their fandom

The experience unfolds through three key moments:

Personalized Daily Deck: ESPN selects three athletes around the fan’s viewing behavior.
Tactile Pack Reveal: The fan opens a digital ESPN foil pack, transforming a recommendation into a memorable daily ritual.
Player Discovery: Each card combines player context, a memorable fact, and a looping ESPN Vert to build curiosity quickly.

Rather than placing another recommendation in a carousel, Daily Deck turns athlete discovery into an active experience:

Personalization → Discovery → Curiosity → Fandom

How we built it

For the hackathon, we built a standalone mobile prototype that mirrors the ESPN home experience and demonstrates the complete Daily Deck journey... receiving a notification to opening the pack and discovering each athlete.

We designed the interaction to feel distinctly ESPN: energetic, sports-focused, and playful without becoming childish or casino-like.

The pack-opening experience uses a state-driven front end with separate wrapper and card layers. This allows the foil pouch to tear and collapse while the same cards visibly emerge from inside before being flipped individually.

We also created a production engineering blueprint using ESPN’s existing personalization, content, feature, model, and experimentation systems.

A production version would require five primary additions:

An athlete-to-Vert content mapping
A model that ranks athletes for each deck
A deck store with expiration logic
A nightly job that generates fresh recommendations
A native client module for iOS and Android

Decks could be generated overnight and cached before the user opens the app, allowing the experience to load quickly without running complex recommendation logic in real time.

Challenges we ran into

Our first challenge was balancing familiarity with discovery. A deck containing only athletes the fan already knows would reinforce their existing preferences, while three completely unexpected recommendations could feel random. Daily Deck needed enough familiarity to earn trust and enough surprise to expand the fan’s interests.

We also wanted the pack reveal to feel like opening a physical trading-card pack rather than watching a standard UI transition. That required maintaining continuity between the wrapper and cards: the cards exist inside the pouch, pass through the torn opening, and remain on screen for the reveal.

Because we did not have access to the ESPN mobile codebase, design files, or proprietary user data, we built a standalone prototype using representative content. We could design the ranking logic and data flow, but we could not train or validate the model using real ESPN behavior.

Content availability created another constraint. Not every athlete currently has the same amount of Vert coverage, which could affect who is eligible to appear in a deck.

Finally, we found that the largest production risk is not the complexity of the build itself - it is coordinating across the teams that own personalization, content, experimentation, and the shared ESPN home surface.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that Daily Deck turns a familiar recommendation pattern into a cohesive daily experience.

Personalization establishes relevance, the foil-pack reveal creates anticipation, and the player card gives fans context and a reason to care. Every design choice supports athlete discovery rather than adding gamification for its own sake.

We also developed a credible path from prototype to production. Daily Deck builds on ESPN’s existing signals and content ecosystem, with a limited set of new components that could be introduced and tested incrementally.

Most importantly, we connected the experience to measurable ESPN outcomes: greater interaction with newly recommended athletes, increased Vert watch time, more viewing opportunities, and stronger retention.

What we learned

We learned that an accurate recommendation is not automatically an effective discovery experience. Fans also need context, storytelling, and an engaging reason to explore.

We learned that surprise works best when it begins with familiarity. Starting from an established interest gives ESPN permission to introduce something... or someone... new.

We also learned that interaction design can change how a recommendation feels. The pack-opening ritual makes the recommendation feel selected and worth exploring instead of simply inserted into another feed.

Finally, we learned that product feasibility includes organizational feasibility. A concept can be technically straightforward while still requiring thoughtful coordination across several systems and teams.

What's next for Daily Deck

The first step would be to test Daily Deck against ESPN’s current recommendation experience using dogfooding cohorts and an A/B experiment.

We would measure:

Engagement with newly introduced athletes
Vert watch time
Player-page and upcoming-game visits
Overall interaction with the deck
Return behavior and retention

From there, Daily Deck could grow through three stages:

Discovery

Expand cards beyond individual players to include games, rivalries, events, comebacks, and emerging storylines. Fans could discover the best moments from the previous night—not only the most famous athletes.

Collect

Allow fans to save the cards they care about and build a personal collection over time. Their deck would become something persistent and uniquely theirs, creating a reason to return even when no live game is on.

Trade

Explore packs, rare moments, and social trading experiences that allow fans to collect and exchange the sports stories they care about.

Our long-term vision is to transform Daily Deck from a personalized discovery feature into a new way for the next generation of sports fans to discover, collect, and connect through ESPN.

Fans know who they love. Daily Deck helps them find who’s next.

"try it out" PASSWORD: hackathon