FanDuel Sportsbook
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FanDuel
With the rapid legalisation of sports betting and gaming in the US, FanDuel launched their initial sportsbook to coincide with this new market and provide a product outside of their traditional daily fantasy sports offering.
However, this speed to market resulted in a product built with, and hosted on third party technologies. While beneficial in the short term in terms of a product offering, and strong market position, FanDuel understood that to sustain the desired growth of their sportsbook alongside the legalisation of sports betting within even more states across the US, they would need to design and build their own sportsbook product utilising both in-house talent, and technologies.
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 varying 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 both MVP and beyond
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.
User flow diagrams
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.
Lo fidelity mockups through to final screens
Challenges
One key challenge that occurred throughout the duration of this project was differing visions and communication with key stakeholders. This proved to be a unique challenge from the perspective of trying to both understand the thinking and logic of industry veterans who were very used to approaching problems in a very particular way, and framing proposed design solutions and patterns that deviated from this way of thinking, in a way that helped them both understand why you didn't agree with approaches taken in other products, and why newer proposed design solutions were more user friendly and better from the business' perspective.
With the sports betting market in the US being relatively new, we also had the obstacle of regulations to comply with, which were unique to every state we planned to be live in. This took the form of session timeouts, providing responsible gaming information, and most importantly location verification.
Final high fidelity screens of in play betting flow
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 an analytics perspective the new app significantly outperforms its predecessor in key metrics such as first time bettors, time per session, live betting, and navigation.
