Gabrielle Earnshaw is a mobile app engineering and strategy consultant with over 20 years' experience; she helps teams turn their great ideas into high-performing digital products.
Her input was pivotal in ensuring the TEAMtalk app, through its development journey, was shaped by expert insight, ensuring a strong launch, user experience, and stable foundation to grow and iterate from.
Reimagining a long-established website like TEAMtalk as an app is no small feat.
It’s more than just resizing things to fit a smaller screen and more about rethinking the entire product experience from the ground up.
What do fans want when they open the app on a Saturday afternoon? How do we get them the latest transfer news in seconds? What absolutely needs to be there from day one?
The product and development team had to dissect what made TEAMtalk special online and translate that into something that felt app-like. That means fast, focused, and intuitive.
Designing for mobile forces you to be ruthless, with no room for superfluous features; instead, you systematically trim anything that doesn't serve users.
“One of the first things we had to do was rewire our thinking,” said Gabby, our mobile apps consultant. “You can’t just shrink a website into a smaller screen instead you have to reshape the whole experience around how people use their phones, often one-handed, in a rush, or on the move.”
We soft-launched last year with a small group of real users as a quiet rollout to test the waters. Watching the first real usage stats come in can be nerve-racking, but those early users are an integral step.
Without a soft launch, you don't know what feels clunky or what people love and want more of. There were a few bugs in the beginning (there always are), but those insights helped us improve.
“Soft launches are essential,” Gabby explained. “They let you see how the app performs in the real world outside the safety of internal testing. Things you thought were minor become major, and features you didn’t prioritise suddenly become dealbreakers for users.”
Behind the scenes, the team has spent the last few months ironing out teething issues while also building with scalability in mind. Scaling isn’t just about traffic numbers but ensuring we’ve got the right infrastructure, support, and team workflows in place to grow quickly without breaking anything important.
There’s been a lot of behind-the-scenes work from the team, from optimising load times to ensuring push notifications go out just as the screamer from your favourite team hits the back of the net.
“Scalability is everything,” said Gabby. “You need to be able to grow without sacrificing stability. A flashy new feature means nothing if your app crashes under pressure.”
One of the hardest parts of getting an app to launch is knowing what to leave out. Every feature feels essential when it’s on a whiteboard. But launching a quality product often means making tough calls and shelving things that aren’t 100% ready. The team did just that, and it paid off. What we’ve launched is stable and polished, and fans are engaging with it in exactly the ways we hoped.
“It’s always painful to cut features,” Gabby admitted, “but those decisions let you focus your energy on getting the fundamentals right. Then you build upwards from a solid base, not a rushed one.”
Now that we’ve got a strong foundation, the focus shifts to growing the user experience. There’s a roadmap packed with ideas, and we’re keeping our ears close to the ground, listening to what users are asking for next.
So again, reimagining a long-established website like TEAMtalk as an app is no small feat and never a straight-line journey. It's a cycle of iteration, but seeing the team's work live is a proud moment for us all, and we're only getting started.