Project Overview

FanBants launched FanBants Reality, a platform for reality TV lovers in Nigeria to experience fantasy gaming, in July 2022. The gameplay was based on Big Brother Naija Season 7 where people could select housemates and form teams to go against other people in weekly contests. The housemates would get points through their actions in the show and our scoring system was based on these actions. After the successful launch, we dug into what went well and what we could improve with the experience.

My Role

My role was the design lead and UI designer for this update, working closely with the Growth Manager on the research results.

Problem Statement & Opportunity

Most users complained about the salary system and tedious team setup process. As these were people who weren’t familiar with Fantasy Sports, assigning salaries to them to buy housemates for their teams would have been confusing to them.

For the next update, we wanted to make sure that all friction concerning team setup was removed. This gave me the idea to remove salary as a feature and also streamline the team setup process.

Previous Flow

Initially, we speculated that the contest entry process should be as compact as possible so that all the necessary information is shown to users straight away. From the home page, they should see the contest card with a CTA button to join a contest and when they interact with it, they are given an overview of how the gameplay works and also an empty state for team setup. The team setup flow is shown below.

PREVIOUS TEAM SETUP FLOW

In hindsight, I can see how this process would have confused people who have no experience with fantasy sports gameplay and also the constant back and forth of selecting housemates for their teams would have turned them off the experience. It was not any better that we assigned budgets to users and salaries to each housemate as players in sports teams would in fantasy gameplay based on their performance.

After team setup, a dialog box allows them pay the entry fee to the contest (if the contest is free, users just submit their team setup into the contest).

Entry Fee Modal

User Feedback

The feedback from this experience was generally neutral. Users were able to enter contests but they kept asking for a how-to guide and we had to create a short explainer video for them. Even with this, they still had trouble understanding the concept of budgets and salaries and would sometimes complain about high salaries for certain housemates they wanted to select. We also observed that there were lots of drop offs during Team Setup because of the back and forth selection process. I had to sit down with some users during a contest to understand their frustrations. The major pain points were the team setup process and also not knowing how to use their budget to pay housemate salaries. We took note of these and after the season ended, went back to brainstorming a better process for contest entry.

Updated Version

The first set of things we had to do was remove the budget and salary features from the process. Then with the user feedback, I was able to guess how user education should be handled. Having a compact page was not helpful to the users and what I did was design the process in such a way that when users interact with the Join Contest CTA button, they would be shown the contest details and an overview of the gameplay so that they understood what they were about to do. I also made sure this page was concise enough to allow users to proceed to the Team Setup page with the CTA button within reach.

Updated Contest Overview page

The Team Setup page also had to be designed in such a way that users will neither be distracted nor confused by the contents on their device screen. The update process for team setup is shown below.

Updated Team Setup Flow

After they were done setting up their team of housemates, they could name their team and submit it into the contest.

We made team naming simple by putting it after team setup

Outcomes

We had significant improvements in the product’s interaction. In the previous season, our activation rate was 18.7%. After the updates, our activation rate increased to 56.7%. Growth and Marketing attributed this to the removal of the salary and budget features. Contest entries also improved about 30% from the previous season and also an increase in creative team names among users.

Check out FanBants Reality here at https://reality.fanbants.com/

Creative team names from our users