Challenges

1)Create a peer-to-peer social marketplace where sports fans can create, share, and participate in paid-entry quiz-based contests centered on live sporting events.

2) Allow users to compete for non-cash prizes including NFT's, experiences and physical items.

3)Bridge the gap between users participating in prop-based prediction contests "against the house".

Competitive Analysis

There are currently over 50 companies in the DFS space in the US. The dominant players are DraftKings, Fanduel and Yahoo Daily Fantasy. Draftkings and Fanduel, which account for 90% of the market share, are now shifting their focus and investments towards betting and targeting their current fantasy customers to convert them to betting.

In the last three years, a new variety of online daily fantasy sports has emerged in which contestants play “against the house” rather than against each other (e.g. Prizepicks, Betcha, Superdraft, Underdog Fantasy, Monkey Knife Fight, etc.). The difference in the business model is that rather than collecting a fixed operating fee per contest, the fantasy sports operator acts as ’the house’, winning and losing money based upon the performance of contestants.

Point of Differentiation

DFS Competitors

HOFr

Value to Casual Fans

Accessibility

Players must engage in extensive research and analysis in order to compete.

Fans make simple choices from a series of quiz style questions.

Lower barrier to contest participation.

Friendly Gameplay

Players are often eliminated after one wrong answer or bad performance of one drafted athlete.

Scoring model awards points inversely proportional to the % of contestants that choose the correct answer, allowing players who do not have the most correct answers to still win the contest by accumulating more points on the questions they answered correctly.

Even the least experienced fans can still win by making unpopular predictions that prove correct.

Contest Variety

Variety limited to one or two different prop formats.

At least 6 types of prop formats (with more to come) including popular formats like over/under, pick’em, range-bound, etc.

More interesting and entertaining contests that are tied to the event in ways that fans care about.

Social Gaming

Players have no idea who they are competing against.

Players can search and challenge peers to contests, socially interact with anyone, and invite their friends to join.

The ability to see your competition leads to greater trust and willingness to invest in the platform.

Peer-to-Peer Matchups

Expert DFS players (sharks) can easily prey on unsuspecting casual players (minnows)

Algorithmically pair players with other comparably skilled players who share the similar interests using a personalized recommendation system.

More fun and rewarding competition against players you know are casual fans like you.

Evaluating the Activity

The global fantasy sports market was valued at $20.4 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 14.7% through 2025. In the US, the fantasy sports market was valued $7.2 billion in 2019, $8.4 billion in 2021 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 10.7% through 2026. There were 45.9 million fantasy sports participants in 2019, and a 2021 Leger survey indicated one in five Americans participates in fantasy sports.

With this in mind, it became clear that player prop contests are here to stay because they allow operators to offer players the ability to predict a greater quantity and variety of statistical outcomes in a sporting event, which is more appealing to sports fans.
‍Source: Statista, June 2018.

Prioritization Plotting

Plotting a list of the possible features onto a graph helped narrow down what was absolutely crucial for delivering the mvp and would could be built upon further down the road. A big draw of using this application is to be able to create contests, share and participate in prop-based prediction contests. By doing so, HOFr will disrupt the DFS market and attract underserved casual sports fans.

Meet the users

Primary

Name:Freddy The Fan

Age:22

Occupation:College Student

Archtype:Competitor

Freddie is an undergraduate student at the University of Texas in Austin.
Plays Fantasy Football and Basketball regularly and is usually the league commisioner. Frequently interacts with friends (in-person/mobile) and talks about sports. Uses phone to read sports news and check scores.
Loves trying new products and making recommendations to friends.

Secondary

Name:Busy Brian

Age:29

Occupation:Project Manager

Archtype:Achiever

Brian is a young professional who finished graduate school two years ago.
A casual sports fan, Brian has enjoyed playing Fantasy Sports in the past, claiming that it makes watching sports more interesting and also provide sa fun way for him to stay in touch with his friends. However, Brian hasn't played fantasy sports the last few years, as his responsibilities with work, family and other hoobies keep him too busy.

Information Architecture

Wireflow

Before moving onto high fidelity mocks, I wanted to get a feel for what the core of the app would look like when put in front of me.

CHALLENGE 1

Question Templates

Creators have the ability to choose from a library of question templates. In the contest creation process, Participants complete these questions by entering in an outcome in a ‘fill-in-the-blank’ format to complete and create their questions.
All questions must have an athlete and a statistic. In some cases, a question will also include an operator, which establishes if the answer is greater than, less than, equal to, or not equal to the indicated statistic.

CHALLENGE 2

F&ck the Sharks

Before establishing a direct navigation to the question builder, users had to set the contest terms including controlling the entry fee offered, the prize distribution, number of questions, number of seats and sport category.

CHALLENGE 3

Question builder

Creating an easy-to-use question builder was a goal that helped drive this project as far as it did. Users have the ability to choose from a pre-approved list of publicly available athlete and player props to create their own contests by changing variable inputs in a question.

Takeaways

Being a product innovation enthusiast myself, working on HOFr UGC was incredibly rewarding. I got to experiment and iterate a lot in the wireframing phase, and narrow down my design process. Although I was not able to fully flesh out other features and designs I wanted to within HOFr due to time constraints, it's not to say I won't try to incorporate them in future projects down the line.

Other contributions

I led from dec 2020 to dec 2022 all design projects and product direction of HOFr App (iOS & Android) from conception to release, I collaborated with product managers, engineers and design colleagues to convert ideas into delightful, engaging experiences for users. I contributed to UI/UX design, managing design systems, testing/prototyping, market launch efforts for new features, design leadership and expertise in branding and visual communication.

Contest Card Builder

Objective: To create a player illustration builder in Figma that allows content creators "select and create" custom game cards without copyright infringement or design effort.

Results: An easy-to use, dynamic builder with +120 illustrations from different sports that allow anyone in the team to create custom game cards for product or marketing purposes, with the ability to preview all creations before saving.

Project Vision