Areena Case Study

Industry: Sports and Recreation

Location: USA

Timeline: 2019 – 2021

Building a multi-faceted digital platform to power Areena’s amateur recreational sports

CHALLENGES

Areena needed a technology platform to scale their operations nationally, requiring a cutover from their low-code solution without impacting existing business operations.

In the process they wanted to rebrand, streamline processes, and improve the experience for existing and new users, referees, and their operations.

OUR ROLE

UX Design

Cloud

Web

Tech Strategy

Mobile

Standing at the cusp of expansion, Areena realized that its low-code software could hinder business growth as they scaled their amateur sport leagues.

Ignite brought a forward looking yet pragmatic mindset to become partners for Areena. Areena got technology strategists, superb user experience designers, and a multi-disciplinary product development team under one roof.

SCOPE OF WORK

Rebrand from Heroleague to Areena
Design a user app that a perfect companion for players: planning their activities before and re-living the experience after their games
Develop a partner app that allows refs and facilitators to capture events, fast, in the heat of the play
Deploy a scalable platform with complex business logic of leagues, teams, free-agents, subscriptions, payments, marketing and more.
Migrate Areena off its low-code platform with close-to-zero downtime and minimal disruption

USER APP

Helps the players manage their leagues, teams and matches along with tracking and sharing their stats. Assists new players to find teams that they will like.

WEBSITE

For a quick browsing and
on-boarding experience

USER EXPERIENCE

We tackled the User Experience from user-centric yet business aligned perspectives.

Our experience needed to balance the needs of a broad set of users from “new to Areena” users whom we wanted to sign up, to Free Agents in search of teams, to team players and captains planning and playing their matches and more.

It was important for the business to get people to play on teams they like and have fun. We delivered the user experience on these goals.

Provide payment options but
nudge towards subscriptions

The Lifetime value of a subscriber is much higher than a casual player. While casual players are welcome, the design encourages people to subscribe.

Increase brand engagement
beyond the game

Areena promises a pro experience and fun at the same time. The experience redesign added stats and leaderboards for users to engage with the app long after the match and a fun survey (which the business takes seriously). Future plans include video clips and shareable moments.

Work around specific pain points

Absentee players result in cancelled matches. People don’t want to show up to the field to have their match cancelled. So, getting positive confirmation of attendance in advance was critical. We tackled this front and center.

Get Free Agents to find teams they like quickly and efficiently

Free agents are players who don’t have teams. The free agent’s ability to find suitable teams is directly proportional to Areena’s growth. By including a list of teams that accept Free Agents as a part of the sign up flow, it became incredibly easy for players to join teams that fit them, allowing them to quickly get on the field and start playing.

REBRANDING

Soon after the project started, the company rebranded itself from HeroLeague to Areena. We worked with the client to understand the values and messages the new brand wanted to convey and came up with the new brand identity and style guide (everything other than the logo).

TECHNOLOGY

We analyzed the usage of the system. The new system architecture is created to autoscale, to handle sudden traffic spikes with long low usage periods, considering most of the games happen in the evening.

The architecture supports more game types, operations management, extends for additional functionality, and integrates with communications, marketing and other services.

Going with Flutter for the mobile apps allowed us to rapidly build performant apps with a common codebase for both Android and iOS, with native look & feel.

ONGOING

The system continues to evolve. We’ve added functionality streamlined processes, improved data analytics and continue to keep the platform humming.

Making it Come Together

Pulling off a complete rearchitecture, redesign and development of five large components (two mobile apps, admin panel, website, backend) in a compressed timeline of 4 months was no mean feat.

With a downtime of less than six hours, we cut over to a brand new platform (and the new brand). We just love it when things come together.

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