Designing a football app that connects and empowers fans to air their views on the beautiful game they love.
The watfootball team set out to build a product that houses the football community and engages football fans in ways that no other top football app was doing at that moment. This approach came as a result of user feedback from their existing (now defunct) sports app, Spectsports.
The local football communities (with Lagos, Nigeria as a case study) meet in neighbourhood viewing centers and similar spots to exchange opinions, dispute facts, play coach and enjoy the beautiful game of football.
Hence, the main question was how do we scale this across localities, states, continents? How do we bring these little communities together and create a network where fans across the world can feel their voice is heard.
Understanding the expectations of the stakeholders, I set out to validate some assumptions and to see if there was a need or a problem where they think they saw one.
This led to series of interviews with football fans and a lot of time spent analysing numerous products in the same and closely related industries. The goal was to get a feel of how best to solve this with the user as the main focus.
Our learnings informed the decision that the product should focus primarily on connecting fans of the same club before extending to other football fans. This also meant other features or benefits the product offers became secondary.
Suppose you walk into a bar and find some jolly fellows discussing football, how do you join in? Well, you just do. It gets more exciting when a couple of these fellows support the same club you do; you might as well start a rock band.
We worked to make the onboarding just as easy - Walk in, join the band.
The goal is to connect all lovers of the game, irrespective of the football club each person supports.
Fans can connect in the dedicated club pages, live chat rooms, matchday chat rooms and in personal dms.
A popular saying in the local communities here is that “the best football managers of all time are the fans”. Football fans always have opinions on the team sheet, player performance, transfer moves and so many other facets of the game.
We pick player performance as the main focus for the MVP. After the game, fans get to rate players and vote for their Man-of-the-Match. These points accumulate over the course of the season to get the fans’ Player of the Season.
We will be looking at other parts of the game in which we can implement this for subsequent product updates.
What good is a football app if you can’t stay updated with news, transfers and live matches on-the go?
So, in addition to all the shiny benefits we wanted to offer, we also had to make sure we had the basics covered; news updates, transfers, match updates, notifications and the likes.
We spent a lot of time iterating on designs and changing design styles based on feedback from the top stakeholders. One major decision that took some time was deciding how to handle content creation and posts on the Club pages; we eventually changed from the initial plan of traditional blogging style to microblogging style.
During the many months working on this project, we changed direction a couple of times, had to remove a lot of product features and make large scale design changes midway through development.
Despite the close collaboration between the product owners, design and development teams, the communication was not really clear on the business' direction and what should constitute the MVP. This would have been avoided if we paid more attention in the research and planning phase to properly understand and scope the project rather that racing through to implementation.
I’m proud to have worked with this amazing team on this product. I would be keeping tabs to see success metrics and learn more from how the product is received when it launches.
