casey chisom - EA/Predictions

Why Predictions?

Score Predictions will provide us with the data we need to identify which affinities users have interest in, giving us the ability to evolve the end product to a highly-personalized experience.

We aim to capture engagement with users by showcasing moments that are traditionally done by commentators, while testing their knowledge and engaging with others to a healthy competition.

Increase social engagement
Allow users to chat about games that interest them

Increase connection
Enable users and their favorite sport, teams, and athletes

Drive personalization
Track user’s engagement in topics to understand their interests

Increase DAU
Give users a reason to return to the app on a daily basis

Discover

After reviewing initial research and defining the goals of this feature, we still had some open questions that needed to be answered to be successful:

How many users participate in polls online?

What type of sports content interests our users?

What are some of the non-sports related topics you like learning about?

Do you prefer a personalized, or global experience?

What makes online content more interesting?

What are your thoughts on social media platforms today?

User Surveys

Partnering with our user researcher, a survey was conducted on 20 participants to help us identify and better understand a user's needs to engaging with sports content, and to measure the extent to which these needs are held.

Initial Requirements

While initial research validated and discovered many opportunities for this feature, we were under great pressure to deliver initial milestones to be released in our MVP build.

Working closely with my Product Manager and small Engineering team, we agreed to move forward with a small sub-set of requirements based on value to the user and overall design and engineering lift required.

Must-Have
• Predict the outcome of an upcoming game
• Comment on a prediction
• View games I have predicted
• View the final results of games I have predicted

Nice-to-Have
• Get notified
• Vote in a poll

Out of Scope
• Win rewards
• Predict key moments in a game
• View data analytics of results

Design

With a plan of attack on how Score Predictions would be rolled out, I conducted a series of 2-week design sprints, allowing time for additional UXR sessions.

Sprint 1:
• Concept Options
• Stakeholder Review
• Prototyping

Sprint 2:
• UXR Testing
• UXR Results

Sprint 3:
• Refinement
• Stakeholder Review
• Hand-Off

Sprint 4:
• Feature Enhancements

Overall, the refined prototype was well-received by our users!

The Closed Beta
Hand-Off

After some review with engineering, we determined a refined scope of what was feasible to deliver for our closed beta with the limited resources we had.

I prepared the final design deliverables and remained on design support for engineers throughout the development cycles.

Some items were backlogged with the intention to deliver them at a later time:

UI was simplified to use only basic components from our design system that are already built to reduce engineering time.

The results carousel was backlogged as we determined additional design requirements were needed, and more testing is recommended.

Additional scores sections were backlogged as we needed more to leverage more data than was immediately available.

Schedules and Results A simplified list of schedules and results allow users to select a specific event to view more detail.

Predict the Outcome A simpler layout using existing logos and buttons was used to cover basic user goal of casting a vote.

Insights A basic text-string of additional information that users can leverage to influence their votes. (we have bigger plans for this!)

“Real-time” community results Show users how the community voted immediately after casting a vote.

Comments Users can engage in comments using the existing commenting functionality borrowed from our Content Feed feature.

ONE notification per day This was a significant engineering lift, but was scoped as a high-priority for users to return to the app, and get users to allow notification permissions.

Results

Predictions V1 was released in closed beta in October 2022

Outside of watching video highlights, it is currently the most-used feature in the app.

68% of all users engage daily in Predictions, and has been linked to an increase in overall daily active users

Nearly all users who vote in predictions have enabled notifications permissions

Users continue engaging with Predictions content long after a game is over

Through data collected from user's predictions, we have a better understanding of each user’s favorite teams and events

Thanks for reading!