Reimagining Fantasy Cricket 🏏 in India with CricPlay
CricPlay, India’s latest free fantasy cricket platform, offers an opportunity to immerse yourself in the excitement of winning and showcasing your cricket expertise. Assemble your ideal team without any cost, engage in live cricket action, and stand a chance to earn real cash prizes.
My Role
Lead Product DesignerUX Methods
Competitive Analysis, User Interviews, User Flows, Personas, Scenarios, Sketches, Prototyping, Digital Wireframes, Manual Usability TestingThe Team
2 Product Designers + 1 Product Manager + 4 Developers (2 FE, 2 BE) +2 QADuration
6 weeks (Designing from scratch to publishing on Google PlayStore)
Final Product
Overview
In 2018, the sports fantasy industry in India experienced a surge in popularity due to the increasing accessibility of affordable internet and the subsequent rise in consumers’ on-screen engagement. It was during this time that Times Internet recognised the potential in this market and spearheaded the development of a fantasy sports app, with myself being an integral part of this initiative.
Our team faced the challenging task of designing, developing, and releasing the application on the Google Play store within a tight deadline of six weeks, prior to the commencement of the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2018, which would be viewed by 462 million individuals on their TV screens across India.
Despite facing numerous obstacles, we persevered and worked tirelessly, dedicating seven days a week for one and a half months to ensure the successful launch of CricPlay. Although some of the initially planned features had to be omitted due to time constraints, we remained committed to delivering a high-quality product to our end-users.
In just 2 weeks of the launch, Google featured CricPlay as editor’s choice app in its “5 Apps to Enjoy a Pitch-Perfect Cricket Season” category.
There are many fantasy cricket apps out there, what makes CricPlay unique? (Competitive Analysis)
Though there are plenty of fantasy sports apps out there in the market with huge number of downloads and DAUs but none of them is built keeping a user’s ease and needs in mind.
Issues with existing products:
- Jaded onboarding process
- Usability challenges
- Design Inconsistency
- Participation necessitates the requisite of real currency (NOT FREE)
- Obtrusive interstitials and advertisements
On the contrary, CricPlay adopts a straightforward design philosophy. We prioritize presenting users with what they want to see, without any unnecessary distractions or interference.
CricPlay is FREE TO PLAY and AD-FREE.
CricPlay users come from different professions, age groups and regions of the country but they all have one thing in common and that’s their love and passion for cricket. Below is a representation of typical CricPlay users.
Registering an account on CricPlay is a simple, three-step process. All you need is a valid mobile number, and you’re ready to get started.
Reason for using mobile number as the only signup method
You must be thinking there are many one tap signup and login solutions out there such as Google login or Facebook login which can also help to omit second and third step as the username can be extracted from user’s google or facebook account.
That’s a valid point, but the majority of users feel hesitant to sign up using their Facebook or Google accounts due to the possibility of receiving spam emails or having unwanted content posted on their Facebook profile by a random application, which can be intimidating.
Also, the mobile number helps users to redeem their prize money directly into their patytm account hence, can be used as a one stop solution for signing up.
Design Evolution
Infinite cups of coffee later, the design finally started shaping up.
Home Screen
Match Updates
Contests
Team Creation
Raising the bar for the entire industry
For most fantasy sports apps, users generally exhibit a specific pattern of behaviour: they create a fantasy team, submit it, and then return to the app solely to check the leaderboard. CricPlay introduced new additions to the fantasy app segment such as Daily predictions, Real Time score updates and a full match score card to make the user experience much more intuitive and improve the on screen time.
Users no longer need to toggle between apps to view match scores and their fluctuating fantasy scores, as real-time score updates are available within CricPlay, allowing both to be monitored in the same app.
CriPlay was introduced in April 2018, and within a period of 8 months, we are nearing 1 million downloads on the Play Store.
If you want to experience CricPlay you can get it from here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cricplay (Only available on the Indian Play Store)
