Project Overview
I collaborated with a team of designers to improve the user experience of, Guillotine Leagues, a fantasy football app.
My responsibilities included:
Organizing various content such as Kanban board, design and research artifacts, etc.
Moderating team conversations
Conducting a competitive analysis
Prototyping the home screen a.k.a. My Leagues
Sourcing and scheduling research participants
Creating an Information architecture diagram and User task flows
Our final product proposed a major redesign targeted to enhance the intense but fun play style that users loved. We achieved this by designing intuitive interfaces and incorporating graphics that aligned with user’s expectations of a fantasy football app.
The Client
The founder aims to become the top provider of Guillotine Fantasy Contests in the industry and become the primary platform for playing guillotine-style fantasy games. Having already operated for slightly more than three years successfully with their website, the founder intends to sustain their current growth rate for the next three years.
Client Goals:
Go live with a much-improved app product before football season begins to make the experience fun and enjoyable for their users.
Needs to be easier for users to complete tasks in the app.
Problem Space
The users' responses to the Guillotine Leagues indicate a need for a much-improved app before football season begins to make the experience enjoyable and fun. The current app is causing users to spend more time operating the app instead of being able to focus on strategizing and completing core functions.
Project Goal
create an app that is easy to use and allows users to access player information quickly in order to provide an enjoyable user experience that adds to the fun and intense game format.
Even the most experienced users had trouble navigating the app
3/3 users expressed having low confidence on creating a waiver bid with “contingent” players.
3/3 Users had to tap through multiple screens to search for the information they needed.
3/3 Users preferred the website experience over the mobile app for more complicated features due to a lack of trust of the app.
However, one upside was that…
Users loved the suspense created by the guillotine league play style and wanted the app to work to enhance the biting character that users expected from the brand.
tackling a clunky design
Based on what we learned through our discovery research, we opted to focus on designing a robust home page, restructure the organization of content, and un-complicate the process of creating a contingent waiver bid.
The current version of the home screen does little to provide users with enough detail needed. The proposed version acts more as a personalized dashboard that gives the user high level information at their fingertips.
The current version of the waiver bid feels outdated as well as having unclear copy to indicate to users what they can expect to happen next. The proposed version contains clearer copy to show users what they can expect to happen when they make their selections.
Users enjoyed the new experience, but still lacked trust on Waiver bids.
The addition of characters, clarity in buttons, and improved copy was well received by our representative users. However, despite making significant changes to the most complex function of the app, creating a New Waiver Bid, users still showed hesitancy to complete a complicated waiver bid that had multiple contingency players.
How might we build trust and confidence between the users and the app?
Our solution was to create an onboarding process with walkthrough tool tips. This benefitted both first time users as well as refreshing returning users once the new football season starts again.
Tool tips - not the touchdown we hoped
Based on our last round of usability testing 100% of users opted in to receive this tutorial, stating that since they have money on the line they would definitely want to read it. However, in reality we saw users skim tutorial screens and miss important information. In response to both of these realizations we experimented with adding color and weight to key words in instructions - we’d like to test how much of a difference that makes, and depending on the findings might also want to consider ways to communicate instructions and outcomes non-verbally.
The Prototype
What I learned from this experience
Sometimes what people say they will do doesn’t always match up with what they will do. We saw this directly when introducing tool tips to our design.
Have a good organization system for your Figma designs. There were many design components that went to each round of prototyping, once we had to package up our final deliverable it was difficult to sort through the different versions.
For more work inquiries or to chat over boba tea feel free reach out to me via email!
Thank you for reading.