Football-Stars: Strategise with the brand new player statistics update!
(Guest contribution by our Game Designer Jules Pommier)
We have just launched a major update for our Daily Fantasy Platform Football-Stars and we absolutely want to share with you the scope of its development as well as some of our methodology during the creation process.
In order to offer an improved user experience and enable more conscious decision-making for the creation of line-ups, the upcoming update grants a transparent glance at all of the Football-Stars’ player statistics. The live data, which is provided by our partner OPTA and is collected for every match and player, will be available to Football-Stars’ users through a brand new feature. While a simpler interface will be available to everyone, users will be encouraged to purchase the premium package for access to all the statistics and diagrams. This update will thus also serve to make the premium membership more attractive to users, whilst not interfering with the free-to-play model.
Having outlined the scope of the update, and now continuing in the vein of increasing transparency, we want to give some insights into the creation process…
We started by laying down which of the numerous statistics the user would find useful for creating their line-ups. We quickly realised that these two sets of stats would be more exciting: an overview of the whole season statistics is useful for the sake of comparison; and a day-by-day view to analyse averages and ratios in more detail is attractive. After regrouping all the relevant statistics into six categories (Points, Passes, Shots, Duels, Touches, Goals) we decided to go for a format split into three blocks. At the top, we re-used the essential information of the old player statistics like the name of the player, club, position, injury status etc. The middle part showed the list view of the season stats and below that a diagram view that would provide the stats of the player for each match day.
For an ideal experience on the mobile platforms, we created the first mockups with iOS and Android in mind and afterwards we thought of how to transpose it to our web interface.
This mockup quickly made us realize that the screen is too crammed if we want to show all of the information at one glance. That is why we settled for a two block layout where the essential player information is still at the top and the bottom block displays the list of the whole season stats. By selecting a specific list entry, the diagram opens up in the space of the second block, hiding the season stats.
While iterating layouts and mockups, we determined the specific interactions of the user interface. Selecting a value to show the corresponding diagram, going back from the diagram to the list view and changing the stats category was all pretty straight forward — Though, the action of opening and closing the whole statistics window/interface itself, was more challenging. As we wanted the statistics to be available from any place with a player card, the obvious choice was to make it open from a button on the cards. Unfortunately the cards are pretty small and already contain a lot of elements — that is why we started considering a tactile gesture to save some UI space.
Opening and closing the player statistics is done by swiping down and up. When opened, you can swipe horizontally to show the next or previous player available. The diagrams are scrollable from the current matchday all the way up to the first match of the season. In order to easily compare matchday stats, the scales of the diagrams are the same across all the different players.
We hope that you are as excited for the new update as we are and we are glad to share with you those insights into the development process. We would love to hear input and feedback from you, so feel free to check it out on Football-Stars.com and on Android or iOS!
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