Fantasy Chat

Fantasy chat is designed as a league-wide channel to communicate with the league manager and other team managers. Additionally, there is also individual Matchup channels where users can banter and smack talk with their opponents. The goal was to improve how fantasy managers connect and interact, boost league engagement, and to retain users on the platform.

Client

ESPN

Services

UI/UX Design

Industries

Sports

Date

Sept 2022

Research

Sports fans today are gravitating toward social channels while watching sports. Among ESPN fantasy users today, 62% of sports fans and likely to interact with others on social media. The need for a fun and interactive chat experience is paramount to the fantasy culture, as it fosters community, and provides authentic group interactions through moments of the season.

Next — Wireframes

Wireframes

We took gathered inspiration from iMessage and others to understand the interaction with input fields, messages and reactions. From the findings we started creating standard chat wireframes, exploring how messages are displayed throughout the experience, as well as GIFs and stickers.

See Next — Components

UI Design

We developed the UI design for the chat bubbles, input fields, and reactions, and componentized them in Figma. We accounted for all the states for input fields and messages, such as errors. We aligned the design to the current PRISM system, and tested our colors and typography to pass accessibility standards.

Next — Reactions & Stickers

Message Input

Message Bubble

Reactions & Stickers

Stakeholders pushed for the idea of league managers talking smack to one another and sending GIFs. The creative team led the design direction of the stickers graphics, I assisted with support from the product design side, and answered questions about the user journey to finding, and sending GIFs and stickers. ESPN had a Giphy account and we utlized their SDK and connected the Giphy API to the Fantasy app.

Next — Prototypes