PlayIndex — Sports Engagement Platform

PlayIndex is a consumer-facing sports platform centered around player-based interactions and investment.

This project is anonymized due to confidentiality.

At the time, the product allowed users to invest in football players, but engagement remained low. Users would complete a transaction and then leave, with little reason to return to the app.

The goal was to increase user engagement and create a more continuous relationship between users and the platform.

I facilitated a design workshop to align stakeholders, uncover product gaps, and define opportunities for improvement.

Following this, I led the UX direction from identifying core engagement issues to designing new interaction layers aimed at increasing retention and user activity.

The platform was fundamentally transactional, with no mechanisms to keep users engaged after their initial action.

Key issues included:

• No features encouraging users to return regularly.
• No updates or visibility into players users had invested in or followed.
• Lack of interactive or dynamic content.

As a result, the product failed to build ongoing engagement or emotional connection with users.

• Ran a design workshop to map the current experience and identify engagement gaps.
• Analyzed user behavior to understand drop-off after initial actions.
• Identified missing feedback loops between user actions and platform updates.

The core insight was that users needed continuous signals and lightweight interactions to stay connected to their decisions, such as investments in players.

• Introduced a lightweight engagement loop through a voting mechanic, allowing users to vote on player potential without heavy cognitive load.
• Added a personalized news timeline so users could follow players and receive updates tied to their existing interests and investments.
• Shifted the product from transactional to ongoing engagement by creating reasons to return, not only improving the initial action.
• Kept interaction patterns lightweight so engagement could happen frequently without asking too much from users.

The redesigned experience introduced new engagement layers, shifting the platform from a purely transactional model to a more continuous interaction model.

• Created multiple reasons for users to return to the app.
• Increased relevance through personalized player updates.
• Introduced lightweight interactions to encourage frequent engagement.

Due to limited access to product analytics, the direct impact on engagement metrics could not be measured. However, this highlighted a structural gap in how success was tracked.

The key takeaway was that design improvements need to be paired with proper measurement frameworks. Without clear engagement metrics, it becomes difficult to validate decisions or iterate effectively.