Client
PGA TOUR
Project(s)
Betting Odds Microsite
Description
The PGA TOUR approached us looking to do two things: educate golf fans who may be new to sports betting, and provide integrated mechanisms to engage with both established viewers and those who might be less familiar with the sport.
My Role
Lead UI/UX, Research and Education
Educate
Since the integration of betting odds was new to not only the PGA TOUR, but also to certain states, one of the main elements of this project was education. We quickly identified that not only would the user need to be presented all of the odds data in an easy to digest manner, but also a lot of users would need to understand betting odds in general.
The other education piece that was very important and new to most of us at Infront X, was to educate ourselves on betting odds as well.
Therefore, the initial phase of the project was many meetings, and calls, and research to understand the betting landscape. We needed to understand how users bet, what the market types were and how the markets differed with different betting providers etc.
Once we felt knowledgeable, we moved forward with our usual brainstorming, userflow and wireframing stage.
Note: We chose to use the multi level tier navigation (mobile) for two reasons. One, we needed something that would work within the app as we were using Webview and two, that was something we saw across all the betting platforms in our research and discovery phase.
Innovate
Through our research and education, we determined the simplest approach would be to divide into three main areas: Odds (being the leaderboards and odds data), Insights (where the user could compare players odds and stats) and FAQ (where the user could learn about betting).
A note on this project as well, we were directed from the very beginning that this would be more of a fluid and iterative process in that as we were determining the UI/UX elements, the PGA TOUR was also selling packages to betting odds companies (FanDuel, PointsBet etc) and that we needed to be more flexible in terms of upcoming project details that may need to change on the fly.
For the odds leaderboards, we used a darker theme in terms of the UI for the reason that we wanted to differentiate it from the normal leaderboards fans were accustomed to. We wanted them to feel like this was new and different, which for the PGA TOUR, it was. As with most of PGA TOUR design, we also needed extra player visibility as well as many edge case designs to handle different states of pre tournament, post tournament etc.
Integrate
As mentioned in the TOURCast project, when we were working on these new elements in 2020/2021, a main goal was integration across all PGA TOUR platforms. We had identified this as a weakness, and this project we also aimed to address this. We seamlessly integrated TOURCast elements into player popup modals. We added odds information and branding to Player Profile pages on pgatour.com and TOURCast. We added entry points on multiple areas of the leaderboard. And the feedback was well received. Fans loved the updated design styles, but also loved how easy it was to get all the data across all of the platforms.
