iOS & Android Case Study
Manchester United Match Predictions
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Overview
Having achieved the status of the world's most popular sports club app, the next objective was to boost user engagement and reduce churn during game weeks. My team developed gamification principles to cultivate habitual behaviors that increase user affinity, loyalty, and perceived value.
By introducing a match prediction game and rewards program, users were incentivised to earn perks and rewards each matchday, thereby encouraging consistent app usage and deepening user loyalty.
My Role
As the Head of Product UX and Design, I spearheaded the project from vision and strategy through UX research, design, engineering, testing, and successful launch. I oversaw and mentored a team of product managers, researchers, product designers, and engineers, ensuring innovation, seamless collaboration and delivery at each stage.
Responsibilities
Product Management, UX Research Lead, UX Copywriting, UX & UI Design Lead, Prototyping, User-testing, Design System manager, QA testing.
Goals & Objectives
My primary goals were to increase user engagement and retention by 20%, boost app loyalty, user satisfaction, and drive higher app registrations.
To achieve these objectives, I focused on creating humane UX & design principles, frameworks and mechanics centered around gamification, iterating on our design system, whilst improving the dev-design handover process.
Research
I conducted benchmarking analysis, card sorting, user surveys, and in-depth interviews to understand user needs and expectations. Deciphering any unknown and mitigating risks. Additionally, I engaged with fan focus groups and internal teams to run workshops to gain insights into their expectations and preferences.
Participants
100K+ users took part
60+ countries
20+ segments and user profiles
Collaborated with internal Product, Content, Marketing, Social, Analytics and Partner relations teams.
Key Insights
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Key Insights 〰️
Engagement & Motivation
Users valued celebrating and tracking their achievements.
Engagement increased with performance milestones and rewards
Users love competing with friends, family and other fans.
Feature Usability & Accessibility
Users prefer simple and intuitive interfaces that feel rewarding.
Users wanted to find and make their predictions quickly.
Users wanted to be clearly informed of pre-match, live match and post match.
Social & Community
Users want to share their predictions and results on social.
Users want to interact with other fans to enhance their experience.
Users are motivated by participating in public and private leaderboards with other fans and past players.
Information & Technical Architecture
Collaborating with our technical lead and engineers, I explored how to integrate a prediction game into the existing app's matchday experience without a complete re-architecture. My goal was to create a robust, secure, future-proof system featuring dynamic calls to action, personalised notifications, and an inbox for participation reminders and rewards.
With the rest of the product team I presented these enhancements to the content, marketing, and social teams to ensure alignment, fostering new engagement opportunities to create a cohesive fan experience across all channels.
Planning & Definition
I collaborated in leading senior product owners to prioritise and capture design and functional requirements using a tailored RICE method, ensuring alignment with user and strategic goals. I maintained close collaboration with all teams to validate these requirements, ensuring they were actionable and aligned with the store's product vision. These tasks were integrated into the sprint planning and backlogs, keeping my approach agile and responsive. This streamlined our workflow, fostering innovation and adaptability as we transitioned seamlessly to the UX & UI design phase.
Journey Mapping
I meticulously crafted user flows for a seamless onboarding process, guiding users through making predictions, understanding game mechanics, and learning the rules for earning points and rewards.
After refining pre-match, live match, and post-match flows based on collaborative feedback, I created an intuitive system for real-time prediction editing and tracking. This informed the club’s push and content strategy. Additionally, I enhanced accessibility and encouraged adoption by enabling participation for new and logged-out users, effectively removing potential barriers.
The Product Design Process
I established a set of UX and design principles for gamification, laying a strong foundation for this new initiative. Due to time constraints, I jumped straight into developing high-fidelity designs, building on our existing design system.
I used a "5-3-1" method in short UX and design sprints: generating 5 diverse concepts informed by research, refining 3 of these, and finally selecting 1 for development. This approach fostered creativity, thorough exploration, and critical evaluation, leading to innovative, user-centric designs.
Productivity & Efficiency
I led the product design to engineering process by fostering cross-functional collaboration, ensuring seamless alignment between design and engineering from the project's inception. Using agile methodologies, I conducted regular sprint planning, stand-ups, and retrospectives to facilitate continuous feedback and iterative improvements.
Leveraging Figma and Jira, I maintained clear communication and documentation. All designs were developed in close collaboration with app engineering teams, ensuring seamless handovers and cohesive development across all platforms. This approach led to improved productivity and significant gains in clarity, efficiency, and stakeholder engagement.
The entire design process was meticulously planned and managed within the agile sprints.
“I kept an open mind, recognising that while data-driven design can drive growth, it might limit us to small gains. Without creative thinking, we risk missing bigger opportunities and better solutions.”
Rapid Prototyping
With my team I transitioned from high-fidelity mockups to working prototypes, incorporating micro-animations, transitions, and gestures to enhance the user experience. To validate these designs, I developed a comprehensive UX research plan to test the prototypes with real users and stakeholders. This process allowed the team to gather valuable feedback, which informed further development and refinement in preparation for the final solution phase.
User Testing
I tested the high-fidelity prototypes using UX Tweak and Figma, with over 10k users remotely in different segments. I also invited a number of fans back to take part in a usability lab. These prototypes featured micro-animations, transitions, haptic feedback and gesture controls to ensure an intuitive and engaging experience. Feedback gathered during these sessions was invaluable, providing insights that guided further refinements.
Beta Phase
Before the release, my team extensively tested with over 100k+ users across both iOS & Android.
The Solution
The Solution
Onboarding new & existing users
Created a seamless in-app and product marketing onboarding flow to introduce the new feature to users, which can be easily monitored, configured, and updated.
Make United match predictions
Implemented a match prediction feature based on humane UX and gamification design principles, allowing users to effortlessly predict the correct line-ups, formation, first scorer, and man of the match. Supporting real-time monitoring and caters to all pre-match, live match, and post-match scenarios.
Earn points, level up your fan profile
Developed a gamification framework for prediction points, enabling users to level up their fan profiles. Introduced micro animations and haptic feedback to enhance usability and highlight successful moments, milestones, and interactions.
Get exclusive perks & rewards
Introduced an app inbox for users to easily access and save rewards and perks earned from milestones and behaviours. Collaborated with the marketing to develop a personalised in-app and push messaging strategy that makes users feel valued and informed.
Developed innovative public and private leaderboards to connect users with fans worldwide. These leaderboards foster a sense of community and friendly competition, enhancing user engagement and providing a platform for fans to interact and share their achievements.
