TIMELINE
Jan - Dec 2023
TEAM
3 Designers
1 PM
TOOLS & STACK
FOR
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Just like Fantasy Football for the NFL
INDYCAR Fantasy is a 'Racing-Themed' Fantasy Sports Product for the NTT INDYCAR Motorsports Racing Series
It allows fans to engage with the series by creating fantasy teams and predicting race outcomes. Participants earn points based on the real-life performance of the drivers they select.
Through 2023, we conducted generative and evaluative research to create new mobile first design features for INDYCAR's Fantasy Racing Game, with a view to enable greater in-game engagement around race events.
MY ROLE
UX Research & Design
CONTRIBUTIONS
Study Design & User Research
UX Design & Ideation
User Testing
CORE CHALLENGE - LOW RATE OF PRODUCT ENGAGEMENT
The fantasy racing game currently experiences lower than expected engagement rates
67%
Retention Rate
(Month on Month)
67%
Retention Rate
(Month on Month)
4-6
Logins Per User / Race Weekend
Product Challenge
These metrics represent game engagement patterns during a race event, which translate to Low Avg Session Times and Frequencies. This means that race fans don’t utilize the product a lot during the course of a race weekend!
Business Challenge
INDYCAR intend to utilize this Fantasy Racing Game platform to incentivize and enable marketing and ad impressions for their most valued sponsors and therefore desire greater product engagement.
2022 data showcases short user session times characterized in bursts only during race weekends.
UNDERSTANDING PRODUCT ENGAGEMENT PATTERNS
There are 18 INDYCAR races each year, which represent 18 key engagement events.
Held from March to August, each race has a gap of about 1-3 weeks on avg.
Therefore, product engagement ebs and flows every 3 weeks. Like this
RESEARCH PROCESS & FINDINGS
Recruiting Users - Initial Survey via Reddit!
Utilizing the INDYCAR reddit thread, we distributed an initial survey to gain a overview of how fans engage and use the Fantasy Racing Game. We were pleasantly surprised to receive passionate and detailed responses from INDYCAR fans of all ages!
RESPONDANTS
73
AGE DISTRIBUTION OF RESPONDANTS
18-55+
SURVEY DESIGN
4 Descriptive Open Ended Questions
4 Multiple Choice Questions
4 Ranking Questions
3 Rating Scale Questions
The survey distribution through Reddit was an unprecedented success! We managed to identify both new and long-term INDYCAR fans, allowing to define user archetypes towards detailed qualitative interviews.
KEY FINDINGS FROM THE SURVEY
70%
Respondents played the game exclusively through mobile based web browsers citing absence of a dedicated mobile application for the game
40%
Users rely on online news sources & social media to stay up to date with INDYCAR and it's race and driver information
30%
Respondents dedicatedly followed race news, practice and qualification sessions
Semi Structured Generative and Evaluative Interviews
Our passionate survey respondants were interviewed through a semi-structured plan to learn Deeper Insights around Product Usage and Sentiment and Deeper Insights around Gameplay patterns. A process of Deductive coding was employed after a few rounds of reading the interview transcripts. This method was chosen not out of bias but to re-affirm our project objectives towards understanding product engagement as it stands.
KEY PROBLEMS & SOLUTION DESIGN
Absence of a mobile first UI leading users away
Users expressed dissatisfaction with the fact that the fantasy game did not have a dedicated mobile interface. The current implementation being a responsive browser based presentation, accessible through safari or other popular mobile based web browsers which was often buggy and unintuitive for users.
No access to driver/performance data. This is crucial in fantasy sports!
A common theme amongst users was the need to understand driver and performance data to make accurate predictions around race outcomes. Users often resorted to external third party websites to read about driver data and historical information around the races.
This meant user traffic was being re-directed away from the app.
SOLUTION DESIGN
Feature 1 - Race Performance & Data Modal
The race performance and data modal is a single page layover designed to enable better in-game decision making for each race week by showcasing a detailed breakdown of current driver performance and statistics.
Chosen for higher feasibility and execution - INDYCAR hold all proprietary race and performance data, but lacked a usable and accessible mobile first design pattern to communicate this data to INDYCAR fantasy users when gaming.
SCROLLABLE PERFORMANCE DATA MATRIX
Page undergoing updates
Let’s build something
exciting together :)
Book a call with me!
I’m authorized to work across the USA :)
Anurag Harishchandrakar
2025