Driving Engagement in a Social Sports Betting Platform

Product Design

Mad Props

User flows, prototyping, design system creation, usability considerations, and engineering handoff

Intro

Mad Props is a social sports betting app that allows users to challenge friends using real betting lines, odds, and prop bets. With both iOS and Android apps already live, the team wanted to increase user growth and encourage more frequent betting interactions.

This project focused on improving engagement by strengthening social profiles, clarifying bet-related information, and simplifying core betting interactions.

‍

Problem

Mad Props needed to improve engagement and retention across its mobile platform to support user growth and sustained betting activity.

‍

Hypothesis

By introducing stronger social mechanics and improving usability across key betting flows, user acquisition, retention, and overall betting activity would increase.

Breaking the work into focused initiatives to drive engagement

→ Social profiles needed a major lift, we started here as it was hidden in the menu and was not social at all, we assume that updating this feature will boost user engagement.

→ Venmo handles all payments, and user observations made by the client showed the process to be confusing, so we wanted to clarify all bet-related payments to avoid friction at a key point in the user journey.

→ Prop cards hold all betting information and can be used throughout the app. To meet the users' expectations we pushed for an update that better-tied game stats, and bet information, and boost user interaction.

Using detailed user flows to align stakeholders and engineering

Creating detailed flows for engineering and stakeholders gave us user journey insights early on and helped us visualize how all variations of the prop cards would fit together. Authors, onlookers, and bet-takers were all thought out.

Establishing a design system to support scalable product growth

Improving bet clarity to increase user confidence and activity

User feedback revealed a lack of understanding about what they were paying for. We needed to include both dollar amounts and a snapshot of the bet in the newly sorted feed.

Introducing social profiles to drive engagement

A public profile on Mad Props allows users to tailor their experience, see their bets, or even visit a stranger's profile to view their bets. Prop cards and ledgers would not be complete without this element.

Simplifying bet cards to reduce cognitive load

The feed of bets previously had three calls-to-action (CTAs) on each card. By removing them until the detailed view of the bet and adding overlays, the feed became less complex and easier to understand.

Outcomes

Increasing session duration through social profile engagement

We projected an 8% increase in user interaction and new user growth by encouraging profile exploration and social interaction.

‍

A simplified bet creation process

The process to create a bet and share them with friends was decreased by 11% by reducing steps in the flow and removing unneeded calls-to-action (CTAs).

‍

Creating a design library to support efficiency and scale

^Since no design library was created we went through our updates and started one to aid the engineers and create efficiencies for future design growth for the company.