A Workhorse Design for Fantasy Sports Pros
DFSR
The Challenge
What started with a partnership between a professional poker player and a content editor (Check out the article on Fizzle), DFSR have rapidly established themselves as market leaders in the expanding industry of Daily Fantasy Sports. Armed with a wealth of statistics-based analysis and a proprietary projection system, DFSR publishes A LOT of content on a daily basis. When the business began, DFSR had been using a poorly designed WordPress theme coupled with an antiquated PHP-based table structure to output their daily Baseball, Football, Basketball, College Football, Hockey, and Golf player value projections. Although DFSR’s cutting-edge information was crisp, the unfriendly design of the website was frustrating users and ultimately resulted in members dropping subscriptions.
Our Approach
Like many startups, DFSR bootstrapped their business from the ground up. They used existing tools to help them reach subscribers quickly and learn from their mistakes – from a startup standpoint, this was smart. When DFSR approached TIF, they were losing subscription renewals and knew it was because of a poor user experience. They needed to partner with a Technology Design firm like Think it First to help them design a better website experience to where we expected people to return on a daily basis. The WordPress theme they were using was inadequate for the amount of articles posted, so we knew a redesign was necessary.
Developed a more cohesive look for the brand
This went a long way toward letting customers they are serious about the product they are offering. In a subscription based sales model, consumers need to feel confident that you are in it for the long haul.
Redesigned website front-end for improved user flow
The site needed to be developed for three different user types the “information seeker”, “the casual gamer”, and “the daily fantasy pro”. The front end experience needed to speak to all three of these unique customer segments if it was to drive increased engagement and customer conversion.
Created of a custom player projection tool
Bottom line… DFSR’s underlying algorithm was really good. It picked winners. But at the time, the tools they were using failed to translate that to users. Think it First worked with DFSR to develop interactive player information modals, lineup optimization, game time insights and for the casual daily fantasy player the ‘1-Click Auto-Calculation’ for creating optimal lineups.
Designed and developed a custom Chrome Extension
Completely unique to the industry, our Chrome extension allowed DFSR users to pass custom lineups directly into FanDuel and Draft Kings right from their browser. No manual entry, no export or import that slows down the process of creating a winning daily lineup. Sadly, both Draft Kings and FanDuel have since changed their terms of use and we can no longer use our extension. But we like to think we played a role in that… and it is always fun to beat the house!
DFSR’s new products also allowed them to create a tiered sales approach with Freemium, Paid & Pro product offerings for different levels of users. This approach is critical to the growth of a product that caters to multiple user types.
“They chose some nice colors and fonts and whatever, but they also made everything work like it should. We stopped having technical issues right away, people understood what our product did before they bought it (which killed most customer complaints), and the product itself was just hot.”
James Davis
Founder & CEO, DFSR
