Predictor The Game
The game dedicated to all the sports prediction prodigies
Predictor The Game, an iOS and Android app, is the game that challenges your abilities to predict the results of sports events. By choosing the sports you like the most among the more than 40 ones available (soccer, car racing, motorcycle racing, tennis, track-and-field, basketball and many more), you will be able to put your ability to predict the results of sports matches to the test. The questions you’ll have to answer will challenge your intuition and your knowledge of sports and every prediction you’ll get right will give you points that will help you climb the rankings of the app.
By playing Predictor The Game you will compete against players from around the world in order to win the title of Predictor of the Year, but you will also be able to play with your friends by forming a group (Home League) that will fight to the last prediction.
How it works
Gaming and customer journey
Gaming apps are always challenging because they pose specific difficulties and complexities tied to user experience and engagement, which always needs to be kept high, and especially to the balance that needs to be maintained between business goals and customer journey. This is true for all the services and products dedicated to mass consumption, but it applies even more to an app development of this kind.
There are two requirements that need to be met equally in order to obtain a product that will stand the test of time, that will create both an economical balance and a well-liked product. The first requirement concerns business goals: once they are established and clearly defined, it is necessary to elaborate a strategy to keep engagement high and ensure user loyalty, in order to have them perform the actions needed to bring economic gain or value to the client. At the same time, we have the necessity and the duty to give additional value to the user, to entertain them, to build a community, to keep them engaged through a loyalty plan. When these two aspects are balanced, the product is a winner, otherwise we risk creating a disparity between the two, drowning the user in messages and requests, overwhelming them with obstacles as they use the App because of pushing in-app purchases, data retention or collection, or on the other hand, we risk creating an App entirely focused on the user, forgetting the business goals that are needed to make the project sustainable in the long run, so it can flourish and keep evolving.
Plan, test, improve, repeat
To get the best result possible when we work with applications that will end up in the hands of a wide range of users, it is necessary to run multiple tests in every stage of development of the project.
The first tests of Predictor The Game were run since the very first stages, when the App was only a prototype; throught some Smoke Tests and interviews, we established some points and characteristics that needed to be implemented into the app in order to garner more interest. Once the first working version of it was ready, a beta version was published, meant only for the users who had shown interest during the earlier stages, and the first functionalities were tested on them, in order to figure out the most critical passages and eventual obstacles the users could meet. All of this was possible thanks to user-friendliness tests and analytics set into the app to anonymously trace the users’ behaviour.
This phase of the test allowed us to modify and solve some functionality issues and some steps, especially the most delicate ones like the registration stage and the fist launch of the App, which could have caused some users to quit if not identified and monitored. In case of complex projects like Predictor The Game, the development of the app needs to go through a cycle of planning, development, testing and tuning that guarantees the success of the product. For this reason we faced this project with an Agile methodology to ensure an adequate time to market and allow a continuous improvement of the App.