TAB were keen to gain a deeper understanding of their young punters (aged 18-34), and decided to invest in research to unearth attitudes, perceptions and behaviours of this audience.
Understanding Young Punters
A deep-dive, multi-methodology approach to understanding how we can build products with longevity, that appeal to young audiences aged 18-34…
PROBLEM / HYPOTHESIS:
Young punters are key to the future of the business and we need to ensure we develop products that resonate with their wants and needs.
RESEARCH:
A series of workshops and interviews were held to understand the following about young punters:
Day to day interactions and touchpoints
General app behaviour and preferences
Perception of racing vs sports, and diving deep into the pros and cons of watching and betting on each
Perception of TAB retail outlets
Perception of competitive set
“Ideal state” features and functions on app and web
A typical customer workshop set up for this initiative
APPROACH:
After the workshops, we conducted an affinity mapping exercise to understand the most common themes for how this cohort perceive the competitive landscape, their key pain points/unmet needs, and most desired features
After prioritising features by feasibility and user-desire, a design ideation session was held to flesh out the more intricate details of how these could look within the app/website. These designs mostly took the form of widgets, which we would later organise into a logical structure.
After we understood each design idea, we took a vote on which elements we would take forward into the low-fidelity prototype design. We would discuss various arrangements of each widget, to understand how they could fit alongside existing elements within the website/app in a way that made sense to both users and the business.
We tested these low-fi designs internally, among stakeholders to understand their first-impressions of this re-designed app structure and appeal of new features
After internal testing, we made some tweaks to the design based on feedback and UX designers began developing a high-fidelity prototype for senior stakeholder and consumer testing.
Once testing was complete, we were then able to regroup to discuss proposed changes to the design for a ‘final’ version.
In retrospect…
The research was ongoing, as part of long-term strategic thinking. The changes were not on the roadmap for actual development during my tenure at TAB…
Despite this, a lot of great collaboration took place among the UX team, and there was a keen interest in the progress of this research among stakeholders.