Sacramento Kings
Call The Shot
Summary
The Sacramento Kings Call The Shot is a predictive gaming app for fans to play along with during live Sacramento Kings games. This experience started in 2016 and was located within the Sacramento Kings mobile app.
Call the Shot is only one of the many experiences I produced with our team and the Sacramento Kings throughout the years. All of our experiences created were located in the Sacramento Kings’ Fan Zone section of their app.
Call the Shot allowed fans to earn points by making correct predictions of player and team stats. Points earned were applied to earn prizes provided by Sacramento Kings and their sponsors.
Problem
The Sacramento Kings approached our team to create a predictive gaming app with a unique interface different from other interfaces we’ve previously designed for other sports teams we had worked with. My design thought process leaned heavily on my love and knowledge for basketball and at the time my new found interest in playing fantasy sports. Working at a startup there wasn’t a lot of time to utilize user research, so having this previous knowledge helped influence my design decisions along the way.
Role
I was the lead designer this project and was a part of the core team each season since working with the Sacramento Kings from 2016. My roles varied from lead designer to product designer working on the Kings’ experiences that range from the showcased predictive gaming app, AR t-shirt cannons, leaderboards and more.
Within Call The Shot, one challenge I faced in the process of enhancing the experience was streamlining the ease of making predictions. This involved updating the way predictions were made while making different action items with the game play screen more accessible. The solution I landed on was having the user not needing to leave to another screen to access certain parts of the experience. One example of how I streamlined this was adding the option to add a Power-Ups in line with placing a prediction rather than having the user do this action somewhere else. A feature that was later added into the experience post launch was to be able to download and apply points straight from the header within the interface. This feature was designed, implemented, and tested within less than a week and resulted to 70% of the users utilizing the new feature.
Adding in these changes pre and post launch showed value in stats over the season increasing game time played, points earned, and interaction with the client sponsors throughout the years.
Feedback
I worked closely with the Kings’ internal team to receive visual design and usability design feedback. Throughout different iterations over multiple seasons I simplified my design to showcase a more seamless interaction within the app by simple updates like prioritizing content over images. The carousels containing images to make predictive decisions delayed predictions having to scrolling one by one to see each player on the team and simplifying it made it easier for the fans who played. At times it was challenging to to implement all feedback coming from the client and this project helped me grow to learn how to prioritize what changes were important from a usr and business standpoint.
