Basketball Glossary

Brazilian basketball operates daily with terminology heavily influenced by English. Tactical expressions, statistics, positions, movements and concepts reach audiences through broadcasts, journalism and specialist conversations without always having a direct translation or a standardized interpretation in Portuguese. The glossary originally organized by Heber Costa e Silva already gathered this vocabulary extensively, but its original format did not fully take advantage of the possibilities of a digital reference interface.

The challenge was to preserve the existing lexical work while turning it into a faster and more intuitive tool: rather than requiring sequential reading, users needed to be able to go directly to a term or browse the vocabulary through different sections.

I transformed the glossary into a digital interface centered on two main ways of exploring the content. The first is direct search — introduced by the prompt “What does ... mean?” — allowing users to start with the term they are looking for. The second is section-based browsing, offering an alternative for people who want to explore the vocabulary more openly.

The interface also preserves essential elements of the original work, including abbreviations, graphic conventions, grammatical classes and multiple meanings within entries. The project therefore does not simplify the lexical content; it reorganizes how that content is presented to make it more accessible and useful in a digital context.

The result is a service tool for the Brazilian basketball community, turning extensive specialist content into a direct reference experience. The project creates a bridge between the sport's international terminology and readers, listeners and fans who consume basketball content in Portuguese.

Within my portfolio, the Glossary is important because it demonstrates another way of working with information: not through reporting or data visualization, but through information architecture, search and product design. It also highlights the combination of basketball expertise, languages and the development of useful tools for a specific community.

I was responsible for transforming the original glossary into a digital reference tool, defining its information architecture, navigation logic, search experience and presentation of entries. The original lexical content was organized and published by Heber Costa e Silva in 2012.