Paddify: Injecting the brand into the product experience
OVERVIEW
Paddy Power is the most well known betting brand in the industry. It has achieved this status through it’s bold branding and edgy, controversial marketing campaigns. But there is a disconnect between the brand and the in-product betting experience.
GOALS
Bring the Brand to Life through the Product
Reimagine betting experience
Create a betting application that is easy to use, fast and makes betting simpler
design challenge
How do we inject the essence of the Paddy Power brand into the product experience?
Timeframe
8 months
Team dynamics
For this project we collaborated with an External Design Agency. We benefit of doing this was to bring some fresh impartial, unbiased perspective and ideas.
PADDY POWER TEAM
Head of Product
Senior PM
Principal Designer 🙂
Senior UI Designer
Developers (x2)
agency team
Creative Director
Branding Specialist
UX Designers(x2)
UI Designers (x2)
Kick Off Workshop
We kicked off the project with a 3 week offsite workshop with the design agency. This was a super intensive 3 weeks where the goal was to examine research and problems, create agreement and alignment, share knowledge and perspective and identify solutions to achieve measurable business outcomes. Activities we conducted in the 3 weeks included:
Review business goals and customer problems
Set vision
Collaborate and share insights
Brainstorm and ideate
Prototypes
Refine ideas
Align and finalise ideas
Output
After the initial 3 week workshop we presented back to the senior leadership team for review. There were 2 outputs from the workshop.
PADDIFY
Complete UI transformation of online product experience. Improved UX throughout all journeys where possible. Made up of tangible and actionable items the team could get working on straight away.
TESLA
Next generation betting application for Paddy Power utilising gestures to create easy to use, fast and simpler betting experience. This concept was more abstract and focused on the future of betting.
Paddify
PROCESS
We immediately started working on Paddify execution.
Broke down projects into 3 delivery iterations
User stories generated for design
Worked in two week sprints with cross functional teams of PM/PO/DM and design
Regular user testing and validation of our solutions
Relentless collaboration between Product teams
WHAT changed
Reduced Colour Palette
Typography
Improved Accessibility (min AA)
More white space
Minimum touch target size
Improved Contrast
Improved Padding and Spacing
Tabs
Cards
Button Styles
Menu & Search
Navigation
Floating Bottom Nav
Improved Betslip
OUTCOMES & Key results
Daily active users up 63% YoY*
Highest increase in NPS (+12pts)
Google Play increased from 4.1 to 4.3
Satisfaction rating increased from 8.1 to 8.3
Betting app rank increase from 6th to 3rd for best mobile site or smartphone app
Preferred across all KPI’s compared to older version
including Ease of Use, Navigation, Look and Feel and felt more ‘Paddy Power’
my role
Problem Solving
Brainstorming, sketching and ideation
Rapid Prototyping and idea development
POC for Product Design with Agency
Voice of Customer
Collaboration
Workshop Facilitator to prioritise roadmap
Support and assist design team with all UX and UI design
Provide direction and feedback for prototyping, user research and user testing.
Ensure consistency across all design outputs for project for mobile and desktop
Tesla
NEXT STEPS
There was a great deal of excitement surrounding the Tesla concept, but there were doubts about its ability to robustly handle the full volume of events and content supported by the product, especially with real content. We were assigned the task of developing a fully functional interactive prototype to breathe life into the concept and demonstrate its functionality using real-world use cases. I collaborated independently with the design agency to create this prototype.
research
We conducted four exploratory focus groups to showcase the prototype from our initial workshop, assess reactions, and gather feedback. This process allowed us to identify the concept's strengths and weaknesses.
Participant Information:
All participants primarily engage in online betting.
They stake a minimum of £20 per week.
They access their primary betting app at least twice a week.
Their age range is 18 to 45 years, and they are predominantly male.
Each group comprised a mix of participants, including:
2-3 Core Online Football bettors
2-3 Core Racing bettors
2-3 Mixed Racing/Football bettors"
Design Process
The design process was broken down into the 3 phases; low, medium and high fidelity.
Low fidelity
This phase was to prioritise content order, define logic and behaviour, create interaction designs, map out core user journeys, and collaborate with the front-end developer to translate sketches into a functional prototype. This involved understanding the finer details and providing direction for building the prototype.
Mid fidelity
To bring everything together, I created the core navigation and way-finding, iterated on the behaviour and interaction design, and tested the the concept with users. My role included journey mapping, defining information architecture and behaviour, rapid prototyping, and conducting user testing (I facilitated six moderated usability tests and incorporated feedback to make necessary tweaks).
high fidelity
Bringing the project to life involved infusing brand presence through visual/UI elements and the use of language, including tone of voice. To achieve this, we brought in a dedicated UI designer to assist with the final design phase. In this stage, my responsibilities included collaborating with and reviewing designs with the UI designer, finalising interactions, behaviours and animations, evaluating designs against our Brand Principles, and handling UX writing.
OUTPUT
The output was a fully interactive prototype demonstrating a new, personalised, gestural based betting experience. We presented it to CEO of Paddy Power and Director of Product with the Design Agency.
testing and validation
We sought user feedback to validate our assumptions and ensure the user experience was coherent, user-friendly, and aligned with our brand. We employed multiple research methods:
Heuristic Evaluation: I led the design team in creating heuristics and evaluating the concept professionally.
Benchmark Report: We compared core journeys against those of Skybet and Bet 365.
VIP Focus Group: We presented the concept to 20 VIP customers, I moderated multiple sessions, and analysed their feedback.
User Testing: We tested core journeys with 7 PP customers. I wrote the script and screener, observed all sessions, and conducted the analysis."
Results
Tesla was quicker to complete all core journeys than competitors
All 6 participants were observed having difficulty discovering the gesture based navigation. More thought needed into signifier, animation, and/or onboarding.
Next Steps
IMPLEMENTATION CHALLENGES
Once we had Tesla ready, the next challenge was how or if we should implement it. There were obvious usability problems that we had to fix, but there were bigger, riskier concerns around resources and the time needed to build it, and how existing customers would react to such significant changes. We set about creating an implementation plan where we broke down the experience into bite-sized chunks and devised a way to layer it into the experience slowly. The plan was to start implementing it after Paddify; however, the project lost momentum and stagnated.
Reflection
COVID
While working on the Tesla prototype Covid hit. This significantly impacted how we communicated, collaborated and generally worked and executed as we all tried to wrap our heads around what was happening while still trying to deliver on time. Some people were personally impacted. It required everyone to apply greater levels of empathy for each other and work in new ways never experienced before
DESIGN AGENCY PARTNERSHIP
It was a great learning experience working with an external design agency so intensively at the start of the project. It required great curiosity to learn from others, sharp product judgement and trusting that we will go further together.