Live predictive gaming
Over the last 2 years I’ve been the head product designer on MLB’s predictive gaming products. A substantial segment of baseball fans participate in fantasy baseball, legal gambling, and mobile gaming. The short term goal of these products are to expand these fan’s engagement with the sport by offering them more opportunities to participate and experience a deeper investment in the outcome of games. The longer term goal is to grow this participation by creating gaming experiences that attract a more casual fan base.
Rally was soft-launched launched during the 2020 baseball season on iOS and maintains a 4.8 rating. Iteration and experimentation continues for 2021 and 2022 seasons.
Players are not just making picks on who will win the game, but on what each individual batter will do once at the plate. Up-to-the-second alerts notify the player of changes to action on the field.
Rally is designed to explore and experiment with the gaming opportunities around make live picks during a game. It was developed with extensive testing of baseball fans along the way. Core gameplay was researched using low fidelity prototypes, and then transitioned to high fidelity vertical slices for the finer interactions of gameplay. Some of the challenging design questions we faced during development were:
• How much statistical data do casual players need to quickly make informed picks? At what point do we overwhelm them with information about players, pitchers, and past performance?
•. The events of baseball on the field are non-linear. Play outcomes might trail subsequent batters. How do we develop a UI that allows users to easily track the events of the game, and allows simplicity from the back end to present data when available?
•. Each person’s broadcast will be behind the app at a different time amount based on geo-location and internet speeds. How do we allow the user controls to sync their app to their own broadcast so they can have a truly working second screen?