CrossFit Games Hashtag Wizard

Overview

The 2019 CrossFit Open saw the return of Custom Leaderboards, allowing athletes to create leaderboards based on their own interests instead of only traditional filters like overall rank, country, or age group.

To support this, the Games team introduced hashtag integration — giving athletes a way to self-identify using tags that described who they were, what they did, or what they cared about.

The Hashtag Wizard was designed to explain the new feature, showcase examples, and help athletes understand how hashtags would power more meaningful Custom Leaderboards.

My Role: Designing a New Social Layer

As the lead designer, I was responsible for helping athletes understand the value of hashtags, guiding them through the wizard, and ensuring the feature felt tightly integrated with the broader CrossFit Games experience.

I owned:

• Defining flows for discovering, selecting, and creating hashtags
• Designing layout and interaction patterns across desktop and mobile
• Creating visual assets, including category badges and “chips”
• Partnering with PMs, stakeholders, developers, and QA to validate behavior

Problem & Context

With hashtag-based personalization being completely new to the CrossFit Games ecosystem, nothing existed yet in product to guide athletes. The first step was to clearly understand:

• What stakeholders wanted the feature to do
• How hashtags would add value to the CrossFit Open leaderboard experience
• Whether athletes needed a guided explanation or would self-discover the behavior

In parallel, the Games and IT teams wanted the 2019 Open to feel more personal and social. Working closely with them, we framed hashtags as a way for athletes to tag themselves — by interests, roles, or attributes they cared about — and then surface those tags in Custom Leaderboards.

Research & Flow Planning

The Hashtag Wizard needed to sit on top of a few key ideas:

• Athletes would manage hashtags inside their profile
• Those hashtags could be used as inputs in the Custom Leaderboard builder
• Hashtags should feel fun and expressive, not heavy or technical

Working from stakeholder input, we started with a massive list of potential identifiers — hundreds of examples of how athletes might describe themselves. Displaying all of them in one place risked overwhelming users, so I grouped them into categories and began exploring layout options based on likely flows.

Initial list of hashtag suggestions, grouped into categories as a starting point for UI exploration.

Throughout, the UI maintained the look and feel of the CrossFit Games design system, so the wizard felt like a natural extension of the existing Open experience instead of a bolt-on tool.

Prototyping, Testing & Category Badges

I explored multiple layout approaches, from simple static lists to more advanced, interactive components. Flows were designed in Sketch and tested via InVision, giving stakeholders an easy way to click through and comment on interactions.

To visually anchor each category, I created badge icons that mirrored the material-inspired look of the Open marketing art for that year.

Hashtag category badges that aligned with the 2019 CrossFit Open visual language.

Early designs surfaced a key problem: athletes might not realize that suggested hashtags were interactive. To address this, I moved toward a more “clickable” pattern — turning suggestions into enclosed chips that looked distinct from primary action buttons.

Each chip also needed to be removable once selected, so we added a clear removal affordance to the left of the label.

Managing Complexity with Layout & Interaction

Stakeholders strongly preferred including as many suggested identifiers as possible, which was at odds with the goal of keeping the experience approachable.

To balance both, I explored:

• A tabbed layout, where each tab represented a category
• “Load more” interactions within each tab to avoid overwhelming the initial view
• Step-based flows that separated suggestions, custom creation, and leaderboard integration

Tabbed layout exploration with reveal patterns to handle larger lists of hashtag suggestions.

Another exploration presented all categories on a single page, moving athletes through:

1. Choosing from curated hashtag suggestions
2. Adding their own custom hashtags
3. Seeing how those tags feed into Custom Leaderboards

Layout exploration showing a guided, step-by-step flow from suggestions to custom hashtags.

Through A/B testing at HQ and with a select group of athletes, we validated that a simplified approach with fewer suggestions per category was more usable and less cognitively heavy.

Desktop layout explorations and iterations as the final flow was refined and aligned with Custom Leaderboards.

The final layout was integrated with the approved flow for the new Custom Leaderboard, ensuring both features launched together as part of a cohesive 2019 Open experience.

Outcome

The Hashtag Wizard shipped in January 2019 alongside the Custom Leaderboard, in time for the CrossFit Open.

It became a key way for athletes to personalize their Open experience — tagging themselves, discovering others with similar identifiers, and surfacing those connections inside Custom Leaderboards.

The feature was supported with launch video content and simple how-to guides to help athletes quickly understand the value of hashtags.

You can view the Hashtag Wizard at games.crossfit.com .

Conclusion

The Hashtag Wizard extended the CrossFit Games leaderboard beyond fixed filters, giving athletes a way to see themselves — and others — through more personal lenses.

This project highlights my ability to:

• Translate a loosely defined idea (“hashtags would be cool”) into a concrete, testable flow
• Balance stakeholder desires with UX clarity and cognitive load
• Design cohesive experiences that tie together multiple feature launches

Paired with the Custom Leaderboard and other leaderboard work, the Hashtag Wizard helped push the CrossFit Open experience toward something more personal, playful, and community-driven.