FanDuel Faceoff: Rewards Feature

CHALLENGE

After releasing FanDuel Faceoff, the next mission was to improve the overall player experience and introduce some new features. In this case, we wanted to create a feature where players were given the opportunity to complete tasks, in order to earn rewards. Our goals were:

• Build loyalty with the FanDuel Faceoff players.
• Increase the number of consecutive days a user would play games.
• Create excitement and delight by giving players a way to earn bonus cash.
• To display the goals in a way that makes sense and feels right to the users.

THE APPROACH

Because we needed to move quickly due to the tight timeline of this project, a decision was made to use the WorldWinner goals engine, as the foundation for FanDuel Faceoff’s rewards feature. We needed to analyze how the existing engine worked and what we could include for MVP. We wanted to talk with FanDuel players to see if a rewards program would be appealing. Also, it was important to review other rewards programs currently being used, by skill gaming platforms.

DISCOVER

Competitive Research: In order to understand how skill gamers were earning rewards, in other mobile gaming platforms, I decided to look a two different competitors. I wanted to look at a few key components. Where do users find their rewards? What important information is provided? When a player completes a task, what is the reward given and how do they collect?

In order to gain better understanding on how the WorldWinner goals engine worked, I mapped out the main flow and key points where players interact with the goals feature.

DEFINE & DESIGN

Storyboard: To influence my decision making, during the design and ideation phase, I created a storyboard. I would refer back to this storyboard to remind myself of who I was designing this product for, and what problems we needed to solve, while keeping in the mind the business goals for developing a MVP.

Task Flows: Before moving into wireframes and UI development, I created some basic task flows that users would be performing, while using this product. These helped to layout the framework for some of the features.

Wireframing & Ideation: To kick off the design process, I started with a quick brainstorming session of sketches to figure out how the navigation could be presented. This way I was able to move quickly into Figma to start designing the hi-fidelity wireframes.

Using components from FanDuel’s design system, we were able to start exploring various design solutions. Below is an exploration into different ways we could display task progress messaging, during the gameplay loop experience.

Usability Testing: As a team, we wanted to test how players viewed the goals page. Did they understand how to complete a task, and how to claim their reward? We decided to create two Figma prototypes for testing, one for new users and one for existing players. Here were the results:

• The majority of participants understood the goals and were excited about the new feature.
• The majority of users noticed the goals tab in the bottom navigation and wanted to explore.
• Many of them found the name “Goals” confusing and suggested using a different name instead. The clear winner was the name “Rewards”.
• All of the players knew to go to the goals tab, in order to claim their reward.

FINAL DESIGNS

Since, the usability testing was a success, the only modification we made was to change the name of the feature from “Goals” to “Rewards”. Working with the UX Content Writer, we updated the messaging in our mockups and I defined the new components being used in the new rewards feature.

Below is a collection of the final mockups of the goals page, and the rewards progress bottom sheet.

Player Education: Since this was a new feature for the FanDuel players, we needed to make sure we had some education of how the rewards program worked. When a player visited the rewards page for the first time, a tutorial message would appear, and a reward could be claimed.

Bonus Visibility: During the research phase, we discovered that there was player confusion around bonus cash and how it was used. Our solution was to add bonus cash messaging on the lobby and contest pages. Below are examples of the 2 messages we quickly tested with players, and then the final messaging that was implemented.

NEXT STEPS

After the successful launch of the rewards feature in FanDuel Faceoff, the next phase would be to expand the variety of rewards offered. We also wanted to develop a second phase for bonus visibility, in order to educate players on how bonus cash is used.