When looking into the problem space of Gridiron Dynasty, I initially dove head first into the sports industry and through multiple contacts began to investigate sports betting. But do to legal reasons and information that can not be disclosed I turned my attention to Fantasy Sports and more specifically Fantasy Football.
This game continues to draw in new fans on a yearly basis and is the avenue that draws a lot of attention from non football fans to the NFL. Fantasy Sports continue to get more and more popular by the year and so identifying problems that exist for Fantasy Football users was a task that not only intrigued me but is relevant to the game of sports today.
66% of Fantasy Football players disagree that they can find all of the information they need on a specific player in the fantasy football app itself.
62% of Fantasy Football players agree that they would like to feel like the actual coach or GM of a fantasy football team while playing the game.
90% of of Fantasy Football players agree that they would like to talk trash about their fantasy football games to their opponents and brag.
To better understand which statistics for different position groups fantasy football players consider relevant in their decision making process, I performed a statistical analysis using a semantics differential survey scale of Irrelevant to relevant and took the mean score of the responses to sort these stats into 3 categories.
To help better understand the users, I created 3 personas along with a corresponding empathy map and journey map to help understand the moments of frustration that users have when researching their lineup as well as what elicits specific emotions that they feel.
Before beginning the sketching process, the most important thing to do was sit down with Fantasy Football players and create flows for key feature sets that would establish the content on each screen, the logic of how screen interact as well as the usability of the product itself.
When pitching key feature set ideas to Fantasy Football users and making sure the idea was plausible for what they needed out of the product, I created a design fiction depicting Research Ronnie going through his research process and using the compare tool to view 2 players at once while also being able to prioritize the information he values in his decision making process.
Ronnie can not decide on which QB to start in his lineup this week so he looks to compare the two using the compare tool.
He quickly looks over Mayfield’s statistics but isn’t too sure if this is the right decision for his lineup this week. Ronnie wants to put in some extra research.
Using the compare tool, Ronnie is able to view a side by side comparison of Mayfield and Burrow’s season averages so he can make a more educated decision.
Ronnie puts an emphasis on average passing yards when making his decision and sees Burrow has an average of 310 compared to Mayfield’s 233.
This sparks Ronnie to go forward with Joe Burrow in his starting lineup for the week.
Ronnie confirms his lineup change and is feeling confident and relieved knowing he has made a research based decision for his team.
Alongside benchmarking with competitive products on the market including Fantasy Football platforms of NFL, ESPN & Yahoo, Fantasy news websites such as Pro Football Focus and current Sports News applications such as Fox Sports, NBC Sports & CBS Sports I was able to begin sketching interface ideas for key feature sets that would be included in my product. These wireframes were then used as a paper prototype and tested on Fantasy Football players to measure the usability of the product.
