Speak Up

The Problem

Nike wanted 70,000+ employees to get better at one of the hardest human skills there is: speaking up when something feels wrong, and listening well when someone else does. You cannot mandate that. A policy PDF does not make a nervous person more willing to challenge their manager, and a town hall does not teach anyone how to take hard feedback without getting defensive. Nike needed to turn "accountability culture," an abstraction, into something a person could actually practice.

What I Designed

As the experience and UI designer on Emerge Interactive's team, I designed a gamified e-learning experience built around four pillars: Speak, Listen, Engage, and Empower. Each pillar takes a courage most people avoid and breaks it into small, rehearsable moves: be direct, describe the impact, manage your triggers, choose the right format, tell the story. The whole experience speaks in Nike's own voice, black and white with a single orange accent, so it reads like Nike talking with its people rather than a compliance vendor talking at them.

Practice, Not a Poster

The design turns each idea into a rep. A learner starts by rating how comfortable they actually feel speaking up, on a simple one-to-five scale, which makes the whole subject personal before any lesson begins. From there they pick a real workplace scenario and role-play it, try wording a hard sentence in their own words, and answer reflective coaching prompts that ask what they would do and why. Every interaction is low-stakes and repeatable, because you build courage by rehearsing it.

I designed the screens in Sketch and built the front end, packaged as SCORM so it could run inside Nike's Moodle learning platform, reach every employee at scale, and track completion.

Why It Matters

Speak Up is the behavioral front end to the same trust problem behind Nike's ethics-reporting portal, which I designed the following year. A reporting tool only works if people have the courage to use it, and courage is a skill you build before the moment you need it, not during. Speak Up teaches that skill up front. It is the training-layer companion to the Do the Right Thing ethics portal: teach people how to speak and how to listen first, and far fewer situations ever have to become a report.