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My friends and I were tired of texting pictures of the sports bets we were making into our group chat. We did this to show each other who made the better bets and ultimately, who knew more about sports. But the pain of screenshotting and sending in our bets from sites of different styles grew quite irritating. A quick Google search later led me to some options that all fell short (discussed further in competitive analysis), which actually made me really excited to do some research in this space.
I reached out to sports betting communities and my friends who bet on games, to figure out how they were sharing their bets.
Through a survey I created with Typeform, we found that around 90% (out of 40 sports bettors) share their bets with their friends and they do this by hosting sports betting contests. Most used excel to host these contests and the others used sites like CBS sports or something similar. I interviewed several of those that completed the survey to get a deeper understanding of the process and the potential frustrations.
"There are some games out there that give you points when you guess correctly and that doesn't feel real."
- Andrew
"I am using excel and it gets the job done while saving me from doing math but it's too manual."
- Kyle
I synthesized the qualitative and quantitative data from interviews and survey results to define two target group profiles. I used these to empathize with my main user groups and prioritize goals according to their needs. This also allowed me to create their personas and user stories.
I also used data from my interviews to create a user journey map. With this map, I'm able to understand how the user feels throughout their experience and where we have improvement opportunities.
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The research was exciting but I wanted to focus my team's effort on one thing and not get overwhelmed with the key insights, so I created a problem statement for Nick.
With the team now focused on one problem, I conducted a competitive audit to see what solutions were out there for creating sports betting contests. I wanted to get a feel for the style, navigation, ease-of-use, and feature set that our users were used to. Using the audit to guide me, I set our team's focus on 3 core functionalities that our design had to include in order to solve for our problem statement.
After defining our core functionalities and understanding how our competition has laid out their sites, I wanted to define our site map. It's easier to understand what wireframes need to be mocked up when you have an idea of all the screens involved.
I created different versions of wireframes for the front page using different element combinations to see which fit well with each other.
Then I mocked up some more detailed sketches to get a better feel for the designs. I took out elements that weren't crucial for the core functionalities that were defined earlier.
I shared the wireframes and sketches with my co-founder, we hashed out which elements we really liked, then I was able to go heads down on building out a prototype in Figma while he was able to start programming and configuring a database.
My co-founder and I went through different UI kits and ultimately chose Material UI for its ease-of-use, simple design, and cost. Material UI also has a wealth of online resources that we could use whenever we got stuck. After making this decision, we discussed which components would work for certain elements in the prototype. We had to make several trade-offs in favor of speed of development because we only had a couple weeks before Thanksgiving weekend when we wanted to launch our beta to NFL fans (This is a popular weekend for football).
Building something from scratch is both the most challenging and fun thing I can do and I'm very grateful to be able to do it for work. It helps tremendously when you have a design process in place. Reflecting on this project I learned things that I should remember for future projects. I learned that I should put less emphasis on building out a prototype in Figma before deciding on a UI kit for development. There were many things that changed after making this decision. I also learned that every phase of the design process builds upon the previous stages. It is important to take your time in order to optimize later phases.