Aja Shamblee Experience Design
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Sportslock

Fantasy Brackets

About

Sportslock is not your typical fantasy app. Sportslock recognized that some sports seasons are just too long. So they offer real-time, short duration match-ups in a bracket style season that quickly settles any disputes of who's better at fantasy in an endless pursuit to be the G.O.A.T.

They hit us up to improve their overall branding and user experience flow but also produce an app they could launch on the web, iOS and Android. This was all happening around the time when you couldn’t watch TV for 30 seconds without seeing 5 back-to-back commercials for FanDuel. The fantasy game was saturated and Sportslock needed to separate themselves from the crowd.

Team Sr. Experience Designer Art Director Technical Architect Front End Developer iOS Developers Android Developers Project Manager
Responsibilities Design lead - UX/UI Design Lead design workshops Design & prototypes Presentations Development oversight
(Xamerin, iOS and Android team) Market Research Competitive analysis Agile sprint process
Let's Begin We started by facilitating some design workshops to develop their brand as well as their voice and tone. This was done using the Cooper Experience Workshop method where we filled the walls with about 60 different images and captured key adjectives on how said images ladder back to their brand. The outcome was a slightly cocky confidence that felt edgier and sophisticated from other fantasy apps. Think Wolf of wall street meets Nike. We developed style tiles for the team to choose from and ultimately settled on one that utilized dark and light interfaces, smooth animations and infused a snarky tone. We called it “Justified Arrogance”. There words, not ours.

Not only did we infuse the branding, but we optimized the experience by improving interactive flows. We knew we wanted to launch an app, so building an experience that took advantage of the unique capabilities of authenticated apps was critical to our interaction experience. As a part of my design philosophy, I strive to base my design decisions on at least educated assumptions, if not comprehensive field research. So a lot of competitive analysis and market research was done prior to jumping into designs and we were able to work faster by implementing learnings from user testing performed by existing products and feedback recieved from the old app’s user flows.

I worked closely with both in-house and agency developers to advise and oversee how the design would translate across iOS and Android. They brilliantly developed both apps using Xamerin, which allowed them to use a single shared .NET code base. The MVP was launched and we continued to iterate on Sportslock using an agile development process to further enhance the experience. We went from a one match-up game, to a multi-sport, fantasy bracket experience where users invite and challenge friends to multiple daily competitions.

SportsLock went on to earn a 20th Annual Webby Award Honorable Mention in the Mobile Sports category – right beside ESPN and Yahoo Sports.

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