Project overview

Goals and Challenges:

  • Re-think fans engagement while respecting social distancing and lockdown measurements

  • Create a stadium like-feel and live the field’s competition’s momentum while sitting ta home.

  • Boost ancillary spend

  • Keep people live informed on every club update and announcement


How?

  • Implement an SDK into leagues & teams existing mobile applications to drive engagement through a second screen experience 

  • Actionable Insights from user research


    Working against the clock, we conducted a 5 days design sprint during which two agencies, and one major football club leadership participated. Even though the product is meant on engaging users during all club engagement touchpoint, we picked the “During-game” as our main target.

Learning about users

We conducted five user testing sessions to ensure that activities were exciting, made sense, and the experience exceeds expectations. 

Change #1:What did I miss?

50% of people using the app while watching the game got distracted sometimes with notifications and messages on their phones which caused them to miss important highlights during the game. The highlights announcement on the app was not enough for them to catchup.Change: Adding a quick description of the highlight with a replay button that quickly shows a snippet of the latest action.

Change #2: I cheered, now what?

60% of the people found that the cheering platform was not engaging enough and they lacked the competitive edge we wanted to bring back to life. The feature was boring.Change: Create a visual team cheer vs opposing cheer competition that invites fans to beat the opposing team’s.

Designed for humans, built with business in mind.

Driven Revenue
  • Creating another channel for monetization

  • Allows Clubs to route fans to web stores to drive purchases 

  • Ability to advertise on your own digital channels

Expanded Features
  • Enables ability to participate in games remotely

  • Reach a much larger population via a second-screen experience 

  • Personalize the fan experience, eventually supplementing portions of the future state, in-stadium experience

Enable Data Based Culture
  • Allows Clubs to gather engagement data from fans in entirely new ways

  • Allows for localization and customization of dashboard based on fans location

Pre-game: is all about bringing pre-game excitement through the app with features such as:

• Countdowns to big games

  • Pre-game news and press-conferences or activity

  • Predict score games

  • Betting capability, and access to additional content and features such as future game fixtures, league standings, merchandising sales, etc.


In-game: We realized the phone is most likely to be a second screen for people watching a game and hence push notifications and screen take-overs at key moments in the game will nudge/pull users to reach for the app to engage in person.


In-game VR: VR can bring an additional layer of interactivity. and bringing users more into the stadium and the live game.People can chose which angle of the stadium to be sat in and seeing the game from and see live interactions from other attendees allowing us to integrate additional physical gesture features such as a Mexican wave perhaps.


Rich Notifications: Whether in-app or not, the user gets a notification when it’s time to get loud.

Cheer Fight Dashboard: When it’s time to cheer, users will select their noise maker. They can see a visual representation of the noise they’re making battle it out with the other side. “Sound bubbles” will clash on screen, and push each other out of the way.Special shouts and cheers purchased or earned by users will add significantly more volume and push the other team’s cheers out of the way.

The cheers are a visual representation of the sound output in the stadium, and allow users to see what they’re hearing and visualize their contribution:

  • Opposing cheer: opposing team cheers “attack” from the top, and will attempt to push player’s cheers down. In the stadium this is represented by the volume of the opposing team’s cheers.

  • Team cheer: when users send out a cheer it will explode from the volume. The higher it can get before being broken apart or pushed aside by the other team, the louder the cheers will get in the stadium.

  • Super cheer: users can earn super cheers through interaction or via purchase. These cheers will push through the field and raise the volume in the stadium.

  • Sound board: users can choose their sound effect

  • Cooldown: special cheers need a moment to recover

After Action Report: At the end of the game, users get a breakdown of their contribution. The focus is on how they added to the excitement. They see their “fan level” increase, and earn currency that can be exchanged for discounts in team stores.They also unlock new cheers, the ability to start cheers, and get a measure of who they cheered for most and how loud the crowd got with their help.

  • Fan rank: more interaction leads to higher levels, more cheers and higher volume

  • Currency: similar to loyalty points, interaction is turned into currency which can be exchanged for value.

  • Volume measure: record of total volume in the stadium, along with a user’s personal contribution.Fan tug of war: which team cheered the loudest? How many fans did they have? How much cheering did they do?

  • Powerful unlocks: unlock mega cheers or start a cheer of your own. Users gain benefit by interacting with the game.

The design results

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