Crafting the ultimate fan experience for Manchester United

Brand ambition and seamless fan engagement

As one of the largest global sports brands, Manchester United shared its commitment to connecting a diverse eco-system of software, products, services, and data through a rich and innovative fan-centric experience befitting of its brand history, reach, and stature

Through multiple pillars of engagement, immersion, and conversion, the UX team was tasked with reinventing and reinvigorating a fully inclusive fan experience across devices and platforms regardless of user location, customer type/tier, or technology constraints.

As part of the ongoing accessibility initiative within the Premier League and organisations like Level Playing Field, SGSA, and MUDSA, the new digital platform had to conform to strict usability and interaction criteria to ensure full usability regardless of any user impairment. Inclusion became a core tenet of our delivery methodology from ideation through to build.

Orchestration of technology and data

Manifesting technology and data through new partners and platforms to orchestrate and influence a new way of audience consumption and engagement. Over 26 different technical integrations allowed us to push the realm of immersion and data display to bring a new and innovative experience across the omni-channel service.

From platform structure via the CMS, DAM, and CDN, to content delivery through StreamAMG & Akamai, weaved in with data points like Opta, Solr, and in-house data services, led to a consolidated rich and robust digital offering for the audience.

Currently the native app has over 2.8 million downloads globally across 240 countries with over 900,000 visitors during a live match. The most downloaded sports app at launch and still the most popular Premier League Club app on both Google Play and Apple App store. Currently still achieving 4.7 & 4.3 rating respectively.

Engaging with a global target audience of over 1.1 billion fans

As of August 2019. Research by Kantar Media

Content logic & chronology

Working closely with the in-house editorial team to envision the future state culture not just for fans but for them and how the business intends to facilitate a 24/7 news service across multiple channels. This required the experience team to design a robust content visualisation service for articles, videos, social, and e-commerce whilst keeping the experience rich and immersive.

A content grid comprising of multiple sized content cards was developed that would showcase all the different types of media within the many potential scenarios: non-matchday, match day, post matchday + analysis, and off-season to name just a few. The grid also had interchangeable components that took full advantage of atomic design principles and allowed the editorial team to have full control of output and display.

Several months of persona and hypothesis building helped develop a strong knowledge domain around audience habits and traits that led directly into feature prioritisation and deprecation of noise.

This streamlined the ideation and delivery process which still utilised focus groups for inline qualitative insight to remove any bias or negative influence thus strengthening the core proposition.

Gamification and Stickiness

Fan Cheer became a unique feature on all content cards that allowed users to interact with articles in a new dimension. Fans could now instantly react to stories, videos, and articles by this new metric that could then be aggregated to show group sentiment. From the individual fan perspective we also wanted to capture their engagement as a form of playback.

This was crafted within the onboarding process where the resulting profile page mirrored player profiles. Not only did this add an emotive layer of ‘belonging’ and being part of the club, but also leveraging the engagement mechanism by displaying this in the form of stats and achievements by way of reward and gamification to ensure users can track their usage.

From the onset a clear delineation was made between the Web experience vs the Native experience to take full advantage of the platform capability whilst still retaining brand and content consistency.

The web focussed on the”World of Manchester United” showcasing news, history, and community, whilst the native experience focussed more on the ”Live Factor” taking full advantage of delivering new content and push notifications for user retention.

Geo-targeting and Localisation

During the initial research phase we had a target audience of 659 million globally which we dissected to truly understand the coverage. Asia constituted the largest fan base outside of the UK with 325 million fans, nearly 49%. Conversion became critical in this market and the digital service had to optimise for this fanbase and its fenced digital space.

Middle east and Africa at 173 million was the second largest geographical segment that potentially involved designing for languages and dialects that could potentially break components.

Northern America & LATAM at a combined 71 million was the smallest but with the most potential for growth both from fanbase and revenue perspective. Europe at 90 million rounded off the tally of 659 million which we used to set a newer global target of 800 million that was surpassed and now stands at over 1 billion fans globally!

A major remit throughout the research phase was to offer the same level of engagement for fans regardless of location. We wanted to fully embrace the segment of fans that may never get to visit Old Trafford Stadium but are as passionate about the club as the most ardent season ticket holder.

One of the biggest obstacles was digital rights management and the resulting scenarios for watching and following a live game. This became the nucleus of the award winning ’Second-screen’ option allowing users to follow games in a low latency balanced data mode.

Data design

Through regular contact with a test fanbase and user groups we were able to use contextual inquiry techniques to understand how the power of data can be more beneficial to the user and how they would consume it.

We were able to quickly paper prototype ideas and build POC’s within a domain of flux as data points were not yet set in stone. Embracing this potential of change made us more adaptive, both from a data point of view but also from the user perspective, and how they wanted friction and noise free experiences that were truly immersive and rewarding.

The ‘eureka moment’ came when we decided to visualise data that was being captured from user interaction. This became a great feedback mechanism for fans and propelled requirements around more serendipitous moments for users as they become more accustomed to the service.

This involved interrogating the datasets offered within the Opta package to allow us to consolidate into newer metrics that could power our visualisations. This allowed us to create new in-game data points that previously wasn’t available.

Game momentum and influencers became core indicators that the crafted experience pivoted around giving the audience instant recognition of a match status as it unfolds. Tertiary data became available as you navigated and drilled down.