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Client
Fanbants
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Services
Product Strategy, Research, Creative Direction, UI/UX Design
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Brief
Design and build the first daily fantasy app for the massive Nigerian premier league market.
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Design Timeline
2 Months
Fanbants is a Premier League daily fantasy app designed for the Nigerian market. I led design strategy and execution on a culturally-adapted product from 0 to 1 that scaled to thousands of active players, secured endorsement deals with professional athletes, and was selected into the Techstars startup accelerator.
Project Background
A few years ago Skyward was approached by Fola Folowosele (ex: Nike) with a fascinating proposition — Build the first and only daily fantasy app for the Nigerian market. We jumped at the opportunity to do something in 6th largest country in the world in a rapidly growing product-space.
The Market
Gambling in Africa is expected to grow 7.5% annually over the next decade and double in size since 2020. Primary growth is expected to happen through increasing access to online channels and proliferation of online services. There are already major sports betting companies active in Nigeria (primarily from the UK or SEA) including bet365, betway, 1xbet, skybet and others, however none of these companies operated a daily fantasy offering.
Additionally, there are inconsistent regulations in Nigeria that make online sports betting fraught with legal problems, creating a market where governmental corruption is the only path for gambling companies to subsist. In contrast, daily fantasy is widely considered to be fully legal (similar to the United States before legalization). These market forces mean that a Nigerian offering could be incredibly profitable to a well capitalized market entrant given deep cultural knowledge.
All stats were pulled from Astute Analytica
Primary Design Challenges
Localization to Nigeria
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Designing a new app for a country that I don't live in is a unique challenge. Countries not only have different expectations when it comes to app layouts and interactions, but even things as seemingly universal as colors, shapes can be cultural preferences. Additionally, other countries have different currencies and languages, which often require unique UI design to compensate for character length or letter shape.
Legal Requirements
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There were some challenging legal gray areas we had to navigate. For one - we wanted to use players likenesses to market the company, but Fanbats had no sponsorship deals in place. Nigera does have lax trademark laws and made sure to research what options were available.
Another legal gray area was payments. This wasn't strictly a design challenge, but we struggled to get payment provider approval because of the gambling nature of the app. We ultimately shopped providers but it meant having to design around changing payment portals, UX, and requirements.
Cold Start Problem
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Early cold-start problems for marketplaces are quite commonplace and these days there are many known solutions to handling them. For Fanbants, the core cold-start problem was a lack of users, especially when Fanbants would be holding contests that require a certain number of participants to make the contest financially viable.
My Process Theory
My Process Theory
Learn as fast as possible
When working with early stage companies, especially ones without a product and product market fit, it’s crucial to learn fast and fail early. In my opinion, it’s best to streamline design processes to only the most crucial elements, and produce the highest quality work as quickly as possible.
Build Business Case for Budget and Timelines
The client had an extremely tight budget, and a timeline of 3–4 months for delivery (necessitating ~2month for design work). We could have extended the design timeline if necessary, but this would create friction with the client. In the end, the question was- would extending the time allocated to design yield a better first product? The client’s goal was to start building their marketplace quickly for an eventual startup accelerator and fundraising. Therefore my job as both a designer and owner at Skyward was to keep costs as low as possible and the timeline as short as possible.
Minimize Pre-Production Research
Performing deep customer research on a country halfway across the world, for a small team with a new solo founder on a small budget would likely be untenable. This would double the timeline and costs of a project and not only slow the client down, it would likely lose us the project altogether. Thus I had to strike a balance between how much research to preform while doing right by the business in keeping costs and timelines down.
The only way to learn real customer’s needs is to launch. Launch something with a hypothesis, and then validate or invalidate that hypothesis and iterate on your results.
Brian Chesky on why testing product without a hypothesis doesn’t work
Some of the top Nigerian apps
Methods
Given the tight delivery timeline, we prioritized rapid market validation. I conducted interviews with local fantasy players, studied user behaviors on WhatsApp and Twitter groups, and collected insights that directly shaped contest structure, global styles, prize mechanics, and social features. While research was lean, it was highly targeted to maximize impact.
Below are the 5 key questions I sought to answer.
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I started by testing other Nigerian apps to see if there were any trends or features that were different than apps designed for an America audience. The apps I tested were a bit of a mess, and the general consensus was that Nigerians are comfortable with more data density and less "spacious" or "clean" designs than American's are, but that they are familiar with many of our biggest apps like FB messenger, Whatsapp, Telegram, Tik Tok and others.
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Our customer was also a Premier League customer, so that was the primary app we expected to be installed. Further, they would likely have the apps of other primary sports betting companies like bet365 on their phones. Finally, I learned, that as with many other Nigerians, there is a generally high sense of technical financial literacy, so users might have other financial apps like banking or crypto on their phones, especially common Nigerian P2P payments apps.
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The general answer to this was that colors should be bold, and Nigerians are familiar with contrasts that are sharp and have high contrast. Colors that reference the Nigerian national team, Nigerian flag, or other premier league soccer teams could lend a sense of patriotism or club pride.
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This was branding question since this product had no existing branding or marketing materials. I had to develop a brand on the fly using a mix of the nigerian national team styles and branding, as well as additional styles that matched the Nigerian national team font.
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The consensus here was that Wilfred Ndidi and Alex Iwobi are the two favorite Premier League players in Nigeria right now. Both are from Nigeria, and so the conclusion is that homegrown players create a sense of cultural and national pride. Outside of that, the most visible and globally popular soccer superstars were the most popular, including Ronaldo and Messi.
The Existing Solution/Competitive Analysis
The existing solution to daily fantasy in Nigeria was a combination of private grassroots fantasy collectives, and the free Premier League Official Fantasy App. Additionally, there were dozens of competitors in the sports betting space, but none with a daily fantasy offering. I analyzed both the function and structure of the private groups through a local connection, as well as the structure of the official Premier League App and a few competitors gambling websites.
Private Whatsapp Fantasy Groups Were Big Money
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The primary Fantasy gambling structure was tied to private groups of friends and family, who then recruited new entrants. They would create premier league fantasy Whatsapp groups and invite other peripheral acquaintances to participate to earn money. These were big gambling businesses sometimes, with organizers earning many hundreds of thousands of Naira a month. We infiltrated a few of these groups to learn how they operated, recruited, and grew. In many ways they were similar, but far smaller, operations to the current US daily fantasy operators. Each week players would choose teams, transfer money, and “Banter” about the ongoing games.
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Ultimately we developed a strategy to incorporate these group administrators as part of the growth strategy. If we could provide the group administrators with a platform to conduct their operations that was easier to use and administrate, they would likely be convinced to migrate to Fanbants, bringing their large groups of players with them. To this goal we also developed a revenue sharing model for these administrators, and designed a solution to allow anybody to sign up as an administrator.
The Premier League Official App
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The official Premier League app had a lot to offer for us in terms of inspiration and structure that we could utilize. Over 11million people play the Premier League Fantasy game a season, making it the most played fantasy game of any soccer league. The game at the time utilized a lot of design elements from soccer video games that made it more "dynamic" and fun to play. There was a pitch view with player positions, much like a video game or the opening of a soccer match. Team colors, badges, and player pictures were shown large and front and center. There were trades and team profiles. And players had a substitution bench that they could use like a real coach. Many of these features we couldn't utilize because of the specific week to week nature of daily fantasy (like substitutions), but we took both the idea of a fun "pitch view" and showing team colors and players in large formats to build immersion in our format.
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Around ~60% of the Fantasy Premier League churns every season, meany at a certain point many players quit playing on their teams. Daily fantasy has the promise to improve on these numbers since every contest is a new entry, and if you did badly last week, you have a new chance this week.
Additionally, we worked to incorporate retention strategies in the design, such as recurring challenges, persistent leagues run by an active administrator among other features.
Competitive Betting Apps/Websites
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As good as the premier league websites were, the betting apps were bad. Both aesthetically, in color choices, design flourishes, overall appeal, and UX, with cluttered, busy, numerically heavy design. On one hand, a cluttered design serves to make the gambler feel like they have more choice and more information to play with. On the other, large walls of information with little heirarchy or style can be overwhelming to new gamblers and creates a large barrier to entry. Plus, it's just not very enjoyable to stare at these UIs all day, and we hypothesized that players looking at a pleasant UI would have more positive experiences with the app. Even if those players lost they'd be more likely to share the app within their circles.
Solving the Cold Start Problem
A daily fantasy app can’t hold contests with high-payout amounts if there are no users joining and paying into those contests. Further, customers are (rightly) suspicious of upstart gambling apps, especially in a country with lax regulation like Nigeria. It was clear we needed to strategically design a solution for handling light early user numbers.
To solve these problems I utilized a number of design tricks like obfuscating, emphasizing, or de-emphasizing certain information. Further, I developed a system where as long as the minimum entries were met the contest would happen with automatically adjusted odds and payouts, otherwise their money would be refunded. This allowed us greater flexibility in what information we showed the user. Finally, I emphasized the social nature of the application through specific UX elements - Share, Invite, and Reward that would ideally promote growth in both contests and users.
Making it Fun
Ultimately daily fantasy is a game, and should be fun! However, one of the clear differentiators between the highly successful Premier League app and the monetized gambling websites was the emphasis on fun vs. financial reward.
Ensuring the game exceeded a standard for fun with players meant win or lose the app would likely be better in most important churn/retention and growth metrics. The other benefit to making the games more fun is increasing the attractiveness to casual players. Casual players tend to spend the least money per person on fantasy games, yet they make up the largest source of revenues overall. If we could increase engagement with casual players over current offerings the client could see larger multiples on revenues.
Making it a Game
I started with a philosophy that making the game closer to the real sport (similar to video games), would increase fun and engagement. Luckily there are other video games in the market that already have a huge following for their fun and engaging gameplay. The massive FIFA soccer video game series is probably the most widely known here.
Riffing off their work I incorporated badging in order to bring the relationship to players favorite clubs to the forefront. I also used large avatars to create a more direct relationship between the soccer players and the game. Finally, I made the team select screens the core emphasis of the app, making them skeuomorphic in order to bring the player closer to the action. If selecting a team felt “realistic” in a way that referenced real football, it could create positive feelings in the players.
Players are put into a position onto the pitch instead of into a spreadsheet, giving the player more of a feeling of control over the lineup.
Advanced Stats
Advanced statistics are a requirement of a playable daily fantasy game. Players need to feel like they have as much control of the outcome as possible, most daily fantasy services in America offer a wealth of stats so players can employ those stats in their player decisions. However, when looking at competitors it was clear that most daily fantasy apps were overwhelming to new players because of the sheer volume of detailed stats. Thus in order to appeal more to new players, I employed a two-tiered approach to the UI. Tier-1 was the most critical, high level stats that we identified in conversations with daily fantasy players. Average PPG and Estimated Points (using PPG, Pick rate, and other stats combined). Tier two was a table of advanced stats that was accessible via clicking into a player directly.
I utilized large photos of the most famous players in nigeria (i.e. Wilfred Ndidi), as well as bright contrasting colors and lines, and the Nigerian National Team font.
Play with friends.
This is the core reason fantasy football is so successful. You play against your friends every week. Games that have a social component within friend groups tend to be viewed as more fun and are certainly have better customer retention. Social pressure is a strong force keeping customers engaged. I worked to design in multiple touchpoints for social interactions, including administrator lead private contests, highlighting invites to those contests, a social component to the contest screens, and the ability to invite new players to the app.
I used large player photos and live injury updates to give more of a team “management” feel. The highest level stats were displayed on the pick page, and the second tier stats on a second page for those who want them.
Nigerian & Premier League Styles
Incorporating the outcome from my cultural research, and research on Nigerian football branding as well as the Premier League, I developed styles that mimicked styles the football fans in Nigeria would be familiar with. I utilized the Nigerian national team typography, as well as similar contrasting bold color choices to the premier league like cyan blue lines and green/blue/orange contrasts.
Social features included league and contest leaderboards, the ability to name a team, dynamic avatars, and bragging rights.
Clebrating the Win
Ultimately the goal of daily fantasy games is to win. It’s the primary reward for playing and the key to retention. Because of this, it’s important to maximize the “reward” of the win condition. I worked on a win-screen that would be a joy to experience as a successful player. Further, instead of hiding the results as soon as the game was over, being able to always view your results and how you stacked up against your opponents allows players to continue to return to the game to get rewarded for viewing their victories.
Realistic looking pitch, colorful position indicators, ability to switch between “pitch view” and “list view”
Feel like the Boss
Managing a team is fun because you’re in the drivers seat. Some people pour through hundreds of data-points to make decisions in Fantasy Football or Football Manager for no financial reward. I worked to improve the “management” feel of the UI so that players would feel connected to the decisions they were making.
The Outcome
Fanbants had a successful launch with thousands of players all over Nigeria. In addition to acceptance into the prestigious Techstars accelerator, on the back of their early success they signed endorsement deals with the highest profile Nigerian stars like Wilfred Ndidi. They are continuing to grow at a rapid rate and are one to watch in the growing Nigerian market.
Wilfred Ndidi wearing official Fanbants gear