Fantasy Football Draft: Improving a Broken Experience
This fall marks the fourth season of the VFL (Viget Football League), where our company league continues its storied fantasy football tradition. Since we’re digital creators and perfectionists ourselves, we find ourselves each year wishing for better software, better experiences, and better tools to research, draft, and manage our fantasy football teams. Year in and year out, we spar about ways to optimize the experience. These ideas end up long forgotten in chats, forums or water cooler talk.
But this year is different. This year, we’re making those fantasies a reality.
A few of our league veterans got together in August to outline some challenges and opportunities found in the many interfaces and experiences of fantasy sports, and discussed how they could be improved.
We examined the complete fantasy football experience, from the draft to the postseason, outlining issues, ideas and design concepts. In this article, we’ve detailed how we’d rework the draft experience. For this and our full user experience experiment read on here.
The Draft
Quite possibly the most important experience of the fantasy season lies in the Draft — the one time of the year where you have the simultaneous attention of all team members, if only virtually. At Viget we gather 14 deep in a Google Hangout, sharing some post-work beer and pizza on the eve of the NFL season.
In our ideal world, the draft takes full advantage of the variety of devices available to league members. Projectors and HDTVs create a more compelling and celebratory view of every pick, while laptops and mobile devices offer team managers the real-time data they need.
New Age War Room
Every player comes to the draft with unique strategies and methods — paper print outs, pivoting spreadsheets, links on links on links. We multitask on phones, tablets and laptops, and some commissioners project an additional screen to benefit league members.
Introducing a dedicated “spectator” view could unlock the potential of having discrete actions and interfaces for your devices. This allows users to research on their laptop while viewing the draft on the TV, then eventually make a selection from their phone — giving users the power to set up the right combination for their needs.
The Waiting Game
While making picks is the primary purpose of the draft, the participants spend the majority of their time as a spectator between picks. We’ve all been there. After attempting to follow along, your friend struggles to find a player, only to be scolded by league members: “he went last round — pay attention!”
Allowing for an option or view to shift the focus could provide users with a better handle on the full landscape of the draft, including which players have been taken. It could even be a valuable content play for fantasy sports providers, allowing them to broadcast the drafts of “celebrity leagues” virtually.
The Pick is in
While we appreciate an emphasis on efficiency when it comes to virtual drafting (256 players takes a while!), the current experience is more utilitarian and lackluster than we’d like — at least for the first few rounds. With a “Pick, move on, Pick, move on” feel, we tend to verbally announce our picks prior to selection to elicit reaction and to take our moment in the spotlight after a long round’s wait.
Without that declaration, the software quickly moves to the next team on the clock and you’re attempting to track the pick in various feeds throughout the UI. We crave an interface that takes a moment to celebrate each pick, and one that would make you and your friends feel pretty important.
As many fantasy footballers embark on their fantasy drafts this week, many will experience the thrill of the draft, and no doubt, some of these same frustrations. Why settle for for the current experience or hold out hope for future software updates when there are so many opportunities for improvement? The draft, and frankly all of fantasy football, could stand to be improved.
