Industry

Healthcare

Company

PocketMD

Introducing New Referral Program To Sportsbook

I led the design of the Refer a Friend promotion - a new referral feature offered by theScore Bet and ESPN BET. The promotion aims to leverage the app’s existing users by offering rewards to referring friends and family.

View theScore Bet

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Timeline

Q4 2023 - Q2 2024

Product

iOS, Android, Web

Role

Product Designer

Problem

User acquisition can be difficult with limited marketing ability in Canada and without spending an enormous amount of money on marketing campaigns. So a user-led source was initiated to capture market share.

Opportunity

Sportsbooks across the US and Canada leverage their user base to drive acquisition through referral programs. In Canada, a referral program will allow theScore Bet to continue to compete with its competition and continually grow their presence. It currently sits at the top spot in Ontario with 35% CAD market share. For the US, with the addition of the ESPN brand, there was no better time for the company to build such a system to allow its users to expand their growth at a minimal cost.

ESPN Bet has targets of at least 10% US market share and a referral program will help aid in reaching those targets. This is especially important within the first few months of ESPN's existence to establish the user base and will continue to prove useful into the NFL season for 2024.

Within the last year, many competitors have launched referral programs of their own

Research

In the early stages of the project, our UX research team ran a moderated study for 3 weeks to gather insights on existing users and the competitive landscape. We completed 20 interviews (10 CA, 10 US) to ask participants about their prior experience with referral programs. From our interviews, it was clear from our findings that:

Referrals were almost a universally known concept

Referral programs are not a new concept. People have a general understanding of what referrals are for, regardless of what the product is.

Most people have participated in some sort of referral program

Every participant has either referred or been referred to some online service or product. Roughly half of the participants specifically participated in referrals for online sportsbooks/casinos

Some snapshots from our moderated study that our UX Research team conducted

Determining factors for participation

Referral programs are heavily associated with incentives

If an online service or product offers a referral program, users will immediately assume that there will be incentives involved with it.

Referral processes must be easy & simple

The more automated the process, the better. Users want a system that requires minimal effort to both send out referrals and complete one that has been sent to them.

Restrictions & requirements are better known upfront

The spend/deposit amount, expiry, and bet restrictions are all details that are important for users to decide on. Users do not want to spend much effort in finding the details and expect it to be easily available.

Security & privacy

The app must feel reliable and quality for it to be trusted. Users feel a level of responsibility when it comes to referring people they know and want to make sure the platform can be trusted with their personal and financial information.

Solution

We built a new referral program which leverages theScore Bet & ESPN Bet’s user base to drive acquisition. After our initial prototypes, we ran 2 rounds of concept and usability tests to finalize our designs:

New Badge

We introduced a notification badge to help users discover where the new feature lived within their account menu.

Navigation

The referral promotion was easily discoverable as the first item in the promo carousel as participants naturally gravitated to the graphical elements of the promo section. Every participant felt that the flow was intuitive and made it efficient to share their invite. They preferred that it was an automated process and that it didn’t require any cumbersome input on their end.

Progress Steppers

Progress steppers fit well with the mental models of users, as it encompasses all the steps they want to be informed of.

The "Complete your referral" card provides guidance around next steps yet still allows users to test out the app and its UI.

Interstitial

As users need to build confidence before committing to signing up, the interstitial confirms that the referral link worked and that a reward is eligible.

As we are currently launching this feature for the end of Q3 2024, we will collect feedback and data from CX and see what we can improve for V2. A special thanks to Ara An (UXM), Tristan Ho (UXR), Gabe Psellas (Lead PM), and everyone on the promotions feature team.