Overview

FanBants Sports is a fantasy gameplay experience for all types of fans in Africa, whether hardcore or casual football fans. These fans become our core users by entering contests every match week to compete with each other using knowledge and strategy of the different leagues and players. The goal is to win prizes at the end of each contest and gain bragging rights. What this means for the company is designing the contest experience to meet user needs and make it enjoyable for them.

My Role

My role as the design lead was to get insight into the user’s experience and based on their feedback, brainstorm and ideate better approaches to the experience.

Problem Statement & Opportunity

We conducted individual user interviews with a few of our core and new users, virtually and in person. Our core users were already used to the experience and did not have a lot of complaints but some suggested that they wanted to have the ability to distinguish between contests in different leagues properly. Our new users were not fully sold on the experience as they were usually confused about what contest to enter. We did not provide enough visual cues to differentiate the contest types and the leagues for them to fully understand and engage with.

This became an opportunity for us to go back to the drawing board and think through the experience and come up with new ideas for the contest card designs.

Current Designs

Right now, the information contained on the contest card are:

• Contest Name and Type

• Total Prize

• League

• Start Date

• Total Entries in Contest

• User’s Entries in Contest

• Entry Fee

The contest card UI design is shown below.

Current FanBants contest cards

One of the learnings we noted was that the information hierarchy was simple enough for users to understand if they paid attention to it but the problem was that they couldn’t really get it at a glance. This meant that our visual communication wasn’t enough to efficiently reach users. We also realized that the tabs for contests i.e. Upcoming, Live, and Past, were not enough for filtering through contests and we needed to enable users to do more than that. With these on our plate, I was able to make some informed guesses and suggestions on how to solve this problem.

Proposed Solution

From one of the usability tests I conducted, I realized that the Total Prize tag was redundant since users already deduced this from the Contest Name. This opens up an opportunity to remove this tag and leave some space on the card. Another proposal is to create visual representations of leagues instead of using the league name tags. This will not only make the contest leagues easily recognizable but will also give the contest cards some visual character. Here are some designs I made for the Contest Cards with the different leagues.

Proposed contest cards

I also think that having filters for contests will be helpful to users as the current treatment only solves for the contest status and users have complained about it being overwhelming to them. Having users sort contests by entry status, leagues, and contest types will reduce any confusion as to which contests to participate in. There are currently seven (7) contest types, namely: classic, mini classic, shootout, mini shootout, triple threat, head-to-head, top half. Different user groups participate in different contest types therefore allowing them easily access these contests will most likely improve their gameplay experience.

Proposed Design Prototypes

Here are some prototypes I made of the contest filter functionality

Filtering contests by league

Filtering contests by entry

Filtering contests by type

Next Steps

The next steps are for me to get stakeholders to buy into this proposal as I can imagine how it will positively impact user experience. Hopefully, we get to work on it and a wild feature/bug does not jump out of the bushes (Pokemon reference).

Check out FanBants Sports here at https://sports.fanbants.com/