Company
FanDuel
Duration
2 Years
Role
Senior Product Designer
Scope of work
Responsive Web
iOS
Android
Leadership
Stakeholder management
Strategic thinking
Storytelling
About
In 2018, the legalisation of sports gambling across various states in the United States marked a significant change in the industry. This regulatory shift prompted a flurry of betting providers to seize the emerging opportunities.
Initially, FanDuel entered the sports betting market with a white-labelled application from IGT, styled to match its existing online services. Despite a delayed start, the launch in New Jersey was highly successful, quickly regaining market share from competitors. This success was replicated with subsequent launches in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, reinforcing FanDuel’s leadership in the expanding industry.
Challenges
Differing visions and communication with key stakeholders meant having to understand the thinking and logic of industry veterans, ensuring proposed design solutions and patterns were framed, in a way that helped them understand modern app design patterns, and proposed design solutions were more user friendly and better from the business' perspective.
Designing for an immature market, catering to both novices who had never placed a single bet before, to experienced bettors expecting a huge suite of fundamental features.
A new market, means new regulations and having to design solutions unique to every state we launched in, taking the form of session timeouts, responsible gaming information, and most importantly location verification.
Migrating from an existing third party solution hosted on legacy technologies, to a new application built from the ground up utilising React Native
Key Results
Improve app store rating. Within 3 months of launch, app store reviews rose from 4.6 to 4.9
Following its release, the new app saw significant growth in daily transactions, $ amount handled doubled, and customer satisfaction scores improved
App improvements and localisation meant FanDuel were able to rapidly expand their offering to 18 new states post launch
The problem
Due to the legalisation of sports betting being relatively recent at the time of this project, it meant we had to deal with an immature market, catering to both novices who had never placed a single bet before, to experienced bettors expecting a huge suite of fundamental features.
The application also had to be incredibly flexible, from state specific regulation on responsible gaming and location based restrictions to live streaming, team licensing, stats and scoring across 16 different types of sports. The content needed to be flexible enough to change completely depending upon what sports were in season or which promotions/games were available.
Furthermore the applications speed and efficiency were crucial. Features such as deposit and withdrawal of funds, to bet placement, to cashing out could all impact a user’s ability to place bets on live games, a product area crucial to business success. Delays or a lack of any fundamental features meant customers would quickly turn to to quickly emerging swathe of competitor offerings.
Early IA planning for various sports
The goal
The aim of the product was not to completely re-imagine the existing application as we did not want to deviate massively from our existing solution or what it offered users. We also did not want to alienate or overload existing users with a complete overhaul of the product from both a UX and UI perspective.
Instead the aim was to make incremental improvements that catered to key user needs, while still migrating to our own tech stack and introducing newer features further down the line.
Page content planning for MVP and Beyond
UX Research
User research was a continuous process throughout the design and development of Sportsbook V2. Working alongside a dedicated UX researcher, who's primary focus centred on conducting usability testing sessions with users, gathering user feedback and distilling these in to insights and recommendations on how we might improve a feature or design was funamental to our process.
My role in research primarily involved creating user flows and interactive prototypes for any features or concepts we wished to test utilising either Sketch or Principle depending on the level of interactivity and animation desired. I also ran regular moderated user testing sessions and workshops whenever our UX Researcher was unavailable.
Early user flow diagram
Design
Time spent time working on various features and improvements for FanDuel's original Sportsbook was invaluable throughout the redesign of V2. It granted us the ability to identify and improve any issues we had identified in the previous project that could not be fixed either due to project scope or technical limitations.
It also meant there was a plethora of research and analytics to inform design directions. The team began by distilling down the app into key areas of functionality and tackling them through iterative workshopping, low-fidelity design work and rapid testing to validate decisions.
Alongside this, the ability to frequently test with existing users and validate our ideas proved crucial as we identified numerous pain points, edge cases, and concepts throughout the development process which could then be fixed before launch.
Low fidelity through to final screens
Results
Upon release we saw that users found the experience markedly smoother and easier to use. Several rounds of pre and post launch testing informed us that the new implementation would make customers lives significantly easier.
From a KPI perspective the new app significantly outperforms its predecessor in key metrics such as first time bettors, time per session, live betting, and navigation.
Final screen examples