Fan Engagement for the win
A user experience that surprised us all
So, John Murray is an experienced man when it comes to televised sports. He had an idea. He wanted to make a sports fan a Millionaire. His idea was in his head. Some of it was on paper. This idea was 10 years old. A lot has changed in 10 years. Technology has leapt forward. Internet speeds are eye-watering and are continuing to grow.
So I was tasked with taking this idea and growing it too. Maturing it. Solving complex problems.
With John and a few other key stakeholders, I encouraged us all to define our user personas. Fan engagement only works if it is accessible. Being accessible isn't just about "alt" tags, colours and font sizes. Being accessible can also be about simplicity.
A guy I admire is Peter Molyneux. Molyneux influenced me in my early UX days. When Lionhead produced Fable, a big accessible UX decision was to limit the amount of buttons needed to play. One button play! I thought this was great.
By doing this, he is attracting a much wider audience. This is exactly what I wanted to do with Millionaire Fan.
So our persona(s) consisted of multiple ages, many levels of digital literacy. Even sport literacy from the die-hard fan to the non-fan.
After I shaped the persona, I moved on and conducted a value proposition workshop. Before this workshop we interviewed lots of possible users that fit our personas. We wanted to get a sense of their feeling toward both watching sport and playing sport based games (Fantasy, predictor, simulation apps.)
Some important aspects that we learned were:
- That fantasy apps were too difficult with calculation needed to purchase players.
- That most apps were too slow to start with a lot of research needed, especially for non-fans.
- That they were good for a while but users soon lost interest once you fall behind your peers or national leagues.
- Not good for older/non-fans/digital illiterate.
So with those in mind, How might we make this app simple for everyone? How might we make it easy to get stuck in immediately? How might we keep them coming back for more?
So after going back to some of our focus groups, I created user stories and user flows. I then tested some low-fi sketches with them. After that, I created a Hi-Fidelity prototype from those sketches that I made, with fresh ideas based around the aspect of simplicity.
I then tested this with the focus group and possible investors. They loved it but I challenged myself to make it even more simple (Think ONE button Kev, ONE button!)
We then teamed up with the Scottish Football Association. I designed a branded version of the app and created digital assets that would be included in the game.
Over two weekends we ran a BETA that included 4 matches. We proved some of our hypothesis. We also learned a lot that helped us create a backlog for future iterations.
We learned that:
- 84% of users entered a game immediately after sign up
- 68% of sign ups were active users and 17% were highly active
- 51 mins was the average engagement time (Over half of the game time!)
- 75% of users said they had a positive impression
- 81% of users thought the game was innovative
- 80% said they’d play this over another predictor game next season
- 95% said that they were more motivated by beating their peers than winning prize money.
Some of these surprised us a lot. We thought money would have been the biggest motivation for playing. We feel that makes our user experience even more compelling knowing that competition trumped monetary value.
We built this app to be white label. So, currently, the senior stakeholders are talking to potential customers/investors such as IMG, Paddy Power, La Liga and Premier League.
I have designed other flavours of this app. So in the pipeline are fan engagement apps for Golf, Basketball and American Football.
I'll keep you posted.