Rugby’s greatest stories, told through data
Creating a digital home for the All Blacks and Black Ferns
Together we:
- supported NZ rugby to lead the way in data parity by designing for balanced representation between mens and womens teams
- thoughtfully mapped, collected and structured data to highlight relationships and enrich historical stats with expert commentary
- replatformed historic data for the All Blacks and Black Ferns onto a modern, secure environment for a future-proof digital foundation
We helped NZR increase their stats site views by over
50%
NZ Rugby faced a challenge: transform their vast repository of inaccessible historical data into an engaging fan experience, making stories of rugby legends interesting and immersive. Their existing website had useful information, but was on old technology, couldn’t be found, and was difficult to use. Our job was to create an absorbing experience for hard-out rugby fans and casual browsers alike.
An intuitive journey transforms raw statistics into compelling stories, and dense data into something enjoyable to explore.
Designing for exploration
NZ Rugby Stats invites people to discover more, whether they’ve turned up for one Ruby Tui stat, or a deep dive into the All Blacks. By highlighting relatable data points like birthplaces and schools, we inspire discussion and encourage casual browsers to journey through the site. As the first digital expression of NZ Rugby’s refreshed brand, the platform leverages iconic simplicity and bold design elements to showcase player achievements through an elegant combination of data and imagery.
Equality through data
NZ Rugby are passionate about data parity between men’s and women’s teams, a goal we’re fully behind and a complex design and data challenge. Working closely with NZ Rugby, we confirmed what data to use and when to display it, balancing discoverability, history, and equality. Even if someone is there for just one rugby stat, they can be inspired to dive into more about any player, male or female. Where All Blacks data is highlighted, there is an equal piece of data for Black Ferns at the same level. If we’re highlighting Dan Carter’s points, say, we’ll highlight Ruby Tui’s points too. Logos, tables and player imagery treat both teams equally. It looks subtle to people visiting the site, but reinforces a message of shared importance, equalises the narrative between the teams, and makes every player’s story equally discoverable and compelling.
Building a data platform for the future
Data was previously hosted on an obsolete platform and needed to be migrated to a new database, carefully considering future scalability. By understanding how the data was structured, we could make decisions about the future database to allow data to be maintainable, extendable and logical, giving NZ Rugby a platform to build on in future. We mapped complex relationships between the huge amount of data points - connecting players to schools, matches to scoring statistics, and team histories to individual achievements. The thoughtful, well-structured data architecture enables us to highlight relationships, and support NZ Rugby to extend the data set in future.
The platform integrates with Opta API, a leading sports data provider, and enriched with historical stats and expert commentary. Though match statistics currently update post-game, the infrastructure supports future real-time data integration, laying the groundwork for more dynamic and interactive fan experiences.
NZ Rugby Stats is built on Silverstripe, enabling us to support easy integration within NZ Rugby’s existing cloud environment and technical stack.
Numbers tell a tale of legacy
Through a modern, secure data platform, we’ve created more than just a stats database - we’ve built a digital home for New Zealand’s rugby heritage. The scalable architecture and future-focused design empower NZ Rugby to continue expanding their stories, adding new teams and players while preserving and celebrating the sport’s rich history. As the platform grows, it will continue to weave together data and narrative to create an even richer story of these NZ legends.
"The richness of design enables the platform to be used as an asset across our other web platforms in the way a text heavy site previously wasn’t able to be used.
Working with Octave throughout the process was particularly smooth, with real ease of communication and a heavy lift from the team to get the project over the line with a tight deadline."
Toby Hunter, Head of Fan Systems, New Zealand Rugby
