Fandelo is an innovative fan engagement app that gives sports, music and entertainment fans all the information they need in a single platform. Fandelo’s founders engaged Luminary to take the user experience of the app to the next level.
Background
As Australia began to bunker down at the start of the pandemic, a fledgling social engagement app – designed for fans of sport, music and entertainment – was beginning to take shape.
The app was Fandelo, born out of the frustration of one of its founders in having to access multiple sources to find content and purchase options around their sports and music idols. Backed by local sporting heroes Ricky Ponting, Tim Paine and Nick Riewoldt, development started in March 2020.
The original prototype was essentially an aggregator platform for publicly available content about athletes, musicians, celebrities, teams, leagues and bands – or what the app calls ‘Favorites’ – including news, video, events and scores.
As development progressed, Fandelo’s creators decided that they wanted to elevate the fan experience. So in 2022, they approached Luminary to help take Fandelo’s design and user experience to the next level.
What we did
What was initially intended to be a four-week ‘big picture’ review of the app and its visual identity, ultimately turned into a deep immersion and product redesign project, with Luminary playing an integral role in redefining the enhanced user experience.
Identifying best practices
After the initial design review, we conducted an analysis of parallel products on the market, identifying best practices in relation to established UI (user interface) patterns. Our findings informed a subsequent review of the app’s navigation and information architecture.
Reimagining the user experience
To create a more frictionless user experience, we streamlined the content hierarchy to ensure that the most critical aspects were weighted more heavily in the navigation, and made key aspects of the app easier to find. We also redesigned the onboarding process to create a more intuitive introduction to the app for new users.
Building engagement
The original iteration of the app featured ‘Fanrooms’, allowing fans to create polls, post thoughts, and generally connect with other like-minded fans. However, to take this a step further, Luminary came up with the concept of ‘fan ranking’, where users are ranked against one another based on their engagement with a Favorite’s content. Fans can also give each other ‘kudos’, which is essentially like a virtual high five for another user’s contributions to the Fandelo community.
The result
Since Fandelo was released on the App Store and Google Play, the app has been steadily gaining organic users on a weekly basis. It has now been downloaded in over 10 countries with an average of 2.5 daily sessions per user, each on average more than 10 minutes in duration. Fandelo has an average rating of 4.7 in its beta format, with a robust roadmap of product evolution yet to come.
Fandelo users are able to read news, watch videos, stream music, view upcoming events, buy tickets, see the latest scores, view socials, post Fanroom content, poll other fans, earn a fan ranking and gather kudos, all in the palm of their hand. A recent feature release saw e-commerce Shop functionality released, enabling users to purchase Favorite-related merchandise and memorabilia. With enhanced Fanroom functionality and product iterations ongoing, the app is well poised to continue kicking goals.
We were incredibly fortunate to have [Luminary designer] Grace assigned to Fandelo. Her design abilities are exceptional, and the level of critical thought, design research and inspiration, as well as studied recommendations she made along the way really allowed us to build a market-defining product for fans. As a start-up we make decisions quickly, we move at a pace. From day one, working with Grace and the Luminary team has been so fluid. We’re glad we made a conscious decision to invest heavily in UX as being central to our B2C offering, and to partner with Luminary in delivering more than we ever anticipated.
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