Mobile App for Football Betting and Match Analysis with Stratagem Technology (2015)

Background

Stratagem Technologies, a sports betting technology company, approached me to ask if they could establish a relationship to help with the recruitment of interaction designers for their growing business developing cloud-based software and sports analysis for sophisticated bettors and investors.

Sports’ betting is not for everyone. As a past-time or a potential career it divides opinion so the first challenge for us was do we feel comfortable working on a project that if successful would encourage betting? And if we did go ahead with the project should we expect all our students to take part?

After consultation with both students and staff, it was apparent there was a significant appetite to take on the brief. For those interested, the design challenge was clear from a UI/UX perspective, and interestingly we discovered that social betting was surprisingly widespread amongst out students – perhaps another case where mobile technology has become a great enabler and changer of mores.

Educational Challenge

How to design brief that included a specific diagnostic assessment of student aptitude and professionalism through the presentation of digital skills and UX methods, whilst also encouraging them to think broadly and creatively in response to a focused topic?

Stratagem set potential design employees a demanding skills focused project to assess their suitability. We chose to set the students a similar creative challenge with two critical differences, firstly we broadened the challenge to speculate on a future service rather than redesign a current product and secondly we allowed the students to work in pairs. We did this to both stimulate their intellectual curiosity rather than just focus on demonstrating skills, whilst at the same time the collaboration would form both an 'in-built sense check' and demonstrate their team-working capability to a prospective employer.

Other issues

More specifically, this year group also needed to demonstrate better concept communication and time management skills which had been disappointing the previous semester.

Creative Challenge

Brief: Present an idea for a mobile application that performs analysis of sports betting for football matches. The application should contain at the minimum, the following tools:

• A Market Monitor: showing betting odds prices for various upcoming and in-play matches
• A Preview and Review of the game: including analysis from an expert football analyst and Twitter & News Feeds.
• In-Play Analysis: assume there is a statistical model that shows at any given minute of an in-play match, what the probability of the Total Goals is.  Allow the user to analyse the match versus this statistical model and using statistical data from the match.
• Place Bets: allow a simple way for users to select and place bets from the above tools
• Social Betting: Allow users to show their friends what bets they have placed

Considerations

Some of the tools listed above display a fairly large amount of information. The design must balance ease of viewing and making decisions versus the limitations of a mobile screen.

Target Audience

The target audience is a global one: anyone who wants to approach betting in a moderately sophisticated manner. 

Process

Over an 8 week period the students went through our established development process inspired by the Engine Group's Service Design process: Orientate, Discover, Generate, Synthesise, Model, Specify, Prototype and Test.

Communication with the client was via email, Skype and face to face final presentation. 

Further workshops on concept generation, storyboarding, concept presentation and advanced information design were created to address additional learning needs.

Deadlines were set for Sunday evenings to allow staff to assess progress before weekly classes.

Results

The 4 groups (8 students) who took on this brief all impressed the client and were extremely positive about their learning experience. One all-female team who had no previous interest in betting found both the user research and design of an app alien but stimulating! Their research process and insights were particularly thorough: http://www.stratagemappck.wordpress.com

Pedagogic learning

Surprisingly, students commented that they both really liked the Sunday evening deadlines and a shortened development period (in the first semester they had 12 weeks for a similar collaborative project). There reasoning for liking the Sunday deadline was two-fold. They liked the idea of focus at the weekend as many of them like their tutors undertook paid jobs to during the week, and secondly there was a sense of completion before starting the new week. The preference for an 8 week project rather than 12 was they liked the pace and lack of time to procrastinate. Personally, I'm if I could conclude that 8 weeks would have been better in the first semester as I think they needed to learn from their more leisurely experience in order to appreciate the benefits of a tighter deadline.

Creative outcome

All groups produced both video prototypes and interactive demonstrations using Proto.io. These deliverables were backed up by a huge online resource of iterative development posted mostly on Tumblr for shared learning.