| Users | Fantasy sports players of all skill levels |
|---|---|
| Employer | SportAI |
| Team | Noah Kim (CEO), Charlie Strohl (CTO), Alper Targhut (Data Scientist, Advisor), Han Truong (Data Scientist, Advisor), Ian Hamilton (Engineer, Advisor), Nathan Kim (Marketing, Advisor), Mark West (Former NBA player, Advisor) |
| Responsibilities | Creative direction, design strategy, UI/UX design, design facilitation and leadership, frontend development, marketing design |
| Resource | www.sportai.io |
| Dates | July 2021 → Today |
When I was approached to join SportAI, the idea of the product was just a seed of what it is today. The existing team created a predictive AI that assigns a value to players before their next game. We later called that value Score+. When they discovered that Score+ performed better than its competitors, they decided to build an app around it.
The team had many questions:
The more questions they asked, the more SportAI’s potential came into focus. They began to define the problem: when it comes to fantasy sports, there is a need for a consumer tool that is simple and direct.
The CTO summed it up best:
“The tools out there are only understood via trickle down effects from published articles by analysts who crunch fantasy data full time. The larger consumer market only sees those results after the fact.” - Charlie Strohl (CTO)
It was clear that the market needed a direct to consumer fantasy sports tool. A tool players trust and enjoy using. To fill that gap in the market was an exciting challenge, but it would need a strong brand design and an app built from scratch, so I decided to join.
We soon discussed how we wanted our app to be perceived in the eyes of the consumer. We saw the success that Robinhood had by simplifying the interfaces common to stock investing and felt there was something applicable here. Most fantasy sports apps are dense with statistics and terminology.
What if SportAI took the opposite approach? Reduced instead of added?
Here was our design ethos:
Simple. As trite as the word has become in brand and UX design today, we still felt it was important to place an emphasis on it. Robinhood went simple and democratized market trading; we wanted SportAI to do the same and democratize fantasy sports by putting powerful, but easy to understand, tools in the hands of the every day player.
Clean and bold. Companies like Nike do this well. Contrasting colors, large type, generous whitespace. We definitely took inspiration from a lot of their design work.