Bet you Haven’t Heard of bet.
bet. bet. bet. Regardless of age or where you are from, it is only in our nature as humans to feel excitement when taking such risks. Accountability is defined as “an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one’s action”. It is this very obligation that we see a lack of in all of us. Every day, we as individuals set goals for ourselves –sometimes those goals are taken to the extreme where we make them promises. However, with these goals or promises, who is out there to keep us accountable for those things? Some may say it is up to them to keep themselves accountable and some rely on others to make sure they get something done.
However, have you ever made a bet with a friend? To make sure that something actually gets done? Or to hold one accountable to a statement? A large problem that we recognized, is that often times, bets are forgotten about — and we as individuals forget to keep ourselves accountable.
That is where our app “bet.” comes into play.
Bet is a social betting app.
Whereas most betting apps revolve around sports, we, the bet. team, wanted this to be strictly social. By strictly social, we wanted to create a platform where groups of friends can make any type of bet with their friends. To create a bet, both parties involved must set deadlines and a criterion. Based on the results, money is then transferred from the individual that loses to the individual that win the bet. A newsfeed will then display winners and losers of bets as well as an individual profile that shows their win/loss ratio in hopes to gamify the betting process. But where and how did we start?
Sprinting Towards the Finish Line
In order to achieve our goal of developing this application, we decided it was best to develop using agile methodology and plan out our sprints. A sprint is an industry term defined as a “set period of time to accomplish particular engineering tasks”. Based on a six-week-deadline, we decided to split our timeframe into three sprints.
Our first sprint was dedicated to developing the foundation of our application’s design. We had to think of a name, logo, branding, etc. All of which would help us design our digital mockups. Our digital mockups would then be rendered in Adobe XD. By having a visual representation of our end goal, we would be able to utilize these assets to conduct user interviews.
Our second sprint would be setting up the basic architecture of our application. Because our application revolves around users being able to CRUD resources (in our case bets, profiles, etc), we needed to design a well thought out backend to ensure that our app would function as planned. Once our backend was laid out, we set out a very basic frontend with no styling or framework involved. Our main priority for this sprint was to create a solid foundation for our application that would perform the very core functionality of creating, reading, updating, and deleting bets between users.
Our third and final sprint would be deploying our application. In order to deploy a product we were proud of, we had to meet certain goals. The first thing we had to ensure was the look and feel of the product. We had an application that functionally completed its core feature, but now we needed to ship something people would actually use. The second thing we had to ensure was a product that not only we could understand, but a product that anyone could simply pick up and understand. This is why we conducted multiple user interviews to understand how others would view and use our app. This feedback would help us refine our application to give our user’s a better experience. By cleaning our product up in both a design and functional sense, we were ready to deploy our product to the web.
We improved throughout each sprint and became more effective in our cycles by learning from our past failures. Not every sprint went as according to plan, but with each sprint retrospective came a better upcoming sprint. It was during these retrospectives that we reviewed the progress of our current project, discussed what went well and poorly, and planned an improved agenda for our next sprint. Over our three sprints, we noticed that our issue of communication, as well as accountability, improved tenfold.
A Slight Detour Towards the Finish Line
A major blocker for our progress in the bet. Team was our schedules as well as where we lived. To commute from one to another would require nearly two hours of commuting. We made it our goal to pair program with one another and tackle new frameworks that we both had no knowledge of together. The issue was finding a proper platform to code synchronously online. We found a couple resources online that with time became very helpful for our workflow. The main tools to find most beneficial for development process were:
- Trello for project management
- Teletype for collaborating on code in real time
- Discord for messaging, voice chatting, and screen sharing.
Throughout the development of bet., we overcame many obstacles as a team, but the important takeaway that we came to appreciate at the end was that we realized that despite our constantly conflicting schedules as well as the distance between our homes, there is always a way to overcome a hurdle.
The Design
When it came to the design of our product our goal was simplicity. We believed that we wanted our product to immediately click with our user. We knew that an intricate process like betting may be intimidating to many. Often times we see that sports betting sites and applications to have a very dated design often including a lot of unnecessary parameters seen in social betting. Our application wanted to be concise and primarily display three things.
- The objective of the bet
- The two parties involved in the bet
- The value at stake in the bet
Typography is more than just a font. The right usage of typography can captivate the user and evoke emotions. When it came to our typography we went for a pairing of Source Sans Pro and Work Sans. We went for this pairing to give a modern, yet simple and clean look. We would use Source Sans Pro for our header text and Work Sans as our body text.
The psychology behind colors and how they express messages to the human mind is fascinating and of utmost importance when designing one’s brand. When it came to selecting a color for our application we went for a teal/turquoise color (#5dcdb3). We decided on this color because of it’s many associated meanings. In particular the associated meaning we strove to instill in our product was friendship and good luck — attributes that we found should reflect upon social betting. Not only did we look into the meanings associated with the color but we did a deeper dive into why the color had such attributes. What fascinated us and led to us to decide with this color is that “…the turquoise gemstone is the symbol of friendship and brings peace to the home and good fortune to the owner”, something that goes hand in hand with making a bet with your friends.
If you have ever gone to a page and had something stand out or catch your attention, odds are it was done so intentionally. When it came to visual hierarchy, bet. uses a magnitude of font weights as well as color to bring out and guide our users. For instance, when looking at the individual cards for a bet, the usernames of the parties involved are of a higher font weight and colored teal to stand out from the plain and ordinary card. This allows the users to quickly see who is involved in the bet. The cards also emphasize the amount that is at stake in the bet by raising the font weight to make it more bold and having the font be at a larger size compared to the other text within the card.
Making Their First Bet to Guide Our Next Step
In order to develop a product that our users would thoroughly enjoy and understand, we conducted a few user tests. The main goal of user testing is to improve a products user interface and experience, identify the product’s use-case, and to gain a deeper understanding of the product. By conducting these tests, our team was able to identify the strengths and weaknesses of our application. Throughout the tests we performed, we emphasized that our testers understood the importance of speaking one’s thoughts out loud, even when given little to no guidance about the application. We did this in order to produce the most accurate results as when any other stranger would pick up the app. We wanted our application to be intuitive and easy to use by any demographic.
It was very pleasing to see the reaction from the user’s when it came to the overall design and feel of our application. Whether it be the sign up page to the alert notifications, the users responded quite positively to our overall visual hierarchy. However what needed further improvement was the overall functionality of the app. We realized that not being able to specify deadlines, create private bets, and search for friends would be just a few of the features that our team would have to begin developing. Overall, the results of the tests were quite positive and provided our team with the necessary information to guide our product in the right direction.
What’s Next for bet.?
The bet. team is looking to take the next step in its process by expanding to more than just individual bets between two. Throughout the next few updates, bet. is looking to add multiple individuals to either party of a bet. We hope to promote a more social community and aspect to making bets between groups of friends. Another important feature is to implement charging the loser’s account and sending the earnings to the winner of the bet. This is a massive step towards having our current project transcend into a full fledged application. Bet. has been without a doubt an incredible learning experience for our team and we hope to not only expand, but continue to learn more along the way.
Use bet. now: https://betapp.fun
