Fan Arena Fantasy Sports

A variety of white label B2B online fantasy sports games, embedded into the client's website.

Problem

How to increase user engagement and lead generation for sports media and broadcasting companies?

A variety of broadcasting and media platforms that focus on sports are looking for new, innovative ways to increase user engagement and have their users stay on their website for longer periods of time.

Solution

A white label fantasy sports game, embedded into the client's website, tailored to the specific business' needs.

Depending on the ongoing or upcoming sports events, we designed a tailored fantasy sports game, following a white label approach. The fantasy sports games ranged from football and cycling to formula one and ice hockey. The UI of the game was matched to the client's branding and enabled the customers to have a seamless experience.

In our fantasy football game for Sporza, users were able to build their football team of 11 players, with a budget of 300m euros. The users were also able to set up private leagues and invite and play against their friends.

Fans then earned points based on the performances of their players in real life. Next to this, we added some cool features like picking a coach for bonus points and transferring two players each game week (people could save up their transfers for later).

In the first 24H of launching the game, there were over 10.000 users signed up to play.

Early stages and research

When I joined Fan Arena, I started creating a well-organized and up-to-date Design System (with Sketch and InVision) of all of the assets they had been using in their online fantasy sports games so far. Additionally, I redesigned their logo to modernize it and updated the iconography to have a more coherent set. Next to this I also was creating online and offline marketing material such as animated online ads, business cards, roll-ups for expos, and large-scale banners.

To understand and build a stronger connection with the target audience, I analysed the existing quantitative data we have from our current live sport fantasy games. I mapped behavioural patterns of our target audiences and defined key user stories and needs. The special learning here was that the sports fans have a strong connection to their favourite team's or athlete's branding (e.g. colours of the sports team, the favourite biker's jersey, etc.), which we needed to focus on within our UIs.

Learnings

I loved working with Fan Arena. I never followed live sports before, but this experience pushed me to play the games myself and I definitely learned so much during that. I also love how passionate sports fans are about their favorite teams and players.

Scarce testing options? Test internally

Unfortunately, with most of our projects, we had little to no time to test our games with end-users. Luckily, our entire internal development team was playing the fantasy games themselves. This was a great way to do internal usability testing and find inconsistencies and issues within our products.

Design System from scratch

I am very proud of the design system I created from the assets that Fan Arena had. Looking back, I remember it as the most organized and structured design file I have ever created.

The dynamics of a small team

In Fan Arena we were all together just under 10 people through these months. I enjoyed it for many reasons. As the only designer, I had great freedom and responsibility to create everything, which worked out well. Secondly, in such a small team you always feel very intertwined with other departments like Sales and Marketing and once a sale is made with another customer, the whole team genuinely celebrates together.