Overtime’s Paid Product:
I designed a fantasy sports product with our previous built infrastructure and existing network of influencer hosts. This is a simplified take on parlay betting that you can play with a group of non IRL friends.
Opportunity:
The OT audience has matured and is being exposed to sports betting and skill gaming products but does not know how to gamble. We believe we can up sell the current user base to becoming paid customers.
There has been a lot of momentum in the sports betting space and the skill gaming space, but there are two things that have not been solved on the sportsbook side: combining betting with social content + an easy to play/understand game.
Goals:
Pioneer a new group-based betting behavior
Make it easy to use
Have users engage with the product responsibly
Develop the casual paid app for OT Fans and 18-24 yos
Acquire a new user base of users who care about putting $ down on sports
Thesis / Proposed direction
Users care less about who they’re betting and more about who they’re betting with.
Low friction and minimal decision making is key to retention: set it, chat about it, sweat it
Core action is about “sweating the bet” with the group.
User Testing:
We Worked with content team to simulate the admin process for the launched app: creating teams, updating chat, and sending final results. Internal testing of the app was done over slack, iterating on designs each day.External testing through discord and group texting with a more refined prototype.
Our Learnings:
The betting experience needs to feel real time. Even when you’ve placed your bet people want to experience constant discussion, analysis and updates.
Connection around the team you picked did form which was our initial goal and felt like groups with shared conviction
It was exciting for users to feel like the bets were “programmed” and dropped at different times everyday (unintentional).
Final Designs
Navigation
Bottom sheets were used to access team information and the top bar was used to access other leagues. Simplifying the navigation left screen real estate for chat. It was critical that app was focused on group betting experience. We settled on this design after many rounds of exploration with alternative navigation solutions.
Making Your Bet
We took inspiration from the trend of spontaneous social apps like BeReal: users would be notified via chat when teams were posted. Users could then browse influencer led teams and with information to help make their decision.
Live Tracking / Results
During gameplay users could track scores of teams and individual players. Chat was continuous and was not reset after game results came through.
Chat
We took heavy inspiration from discord and other leading chat apps. We know users come to expect certain features with chat which we needed to accommodate.
Profile / Adding Funds
Designing the wallet and transaction flows was a new challenge. This was also based on research from other betting products. We made the user profile the central hub for managing money.
Sign Up / Verification
Designing the sign up and verification flow was an involved process that need to accomplish both legal obligations and a low friction onboarding experience. A decision the team made was to allow user to browse the app and view teams before they were forced to verify their account in order to improve retention.
