Cravada Fantasy Game

Cravada is a fantasy game developed in partnership with CBV (Brazilian Volleyball Confederation) aimed at celebrating the Superliga and fostering closer relationships among fans, clubs, and athletes. It also aims to promote volleyball to a broader audience through engaging educational content about the sport, its rules, and the championship.

I primarily worked on the product interface design, the development of its design system, and the initial evolution phases, closely monitoring user engagement and platform usage.

Designing Cravada presented several unique challenges:

1. Brand Colors: Choosing neutral brand colors was crucial to avoid any association with specific teams, maintaining the product's impartiality. This was particularly challenging given the limited color palette.
2. Interface Design: Distinguishing Cravada from other fantasy games required a unique and appealing interface.
3. Player Cards: Automating the creation of player cards while ensuring they were visually distinct and informative.

A major challenge in any sports-related product is choosing the brand colors. It's crucial to be mindful not to select colors associated with specific teams to maintain the product's neutrality, which presents a greater challenge when working within a limited color palette. This poses yet another challenge, in which I needed to find in this limited palette a way to distinguish Cravada from other fantasy games with a unique and appealing interface.

We designed a discovery process that included both primary research and a closer engagement with end-users through in-depth interviews and idea generation sessions with the target audience. Our goal was to understand the motivations behind sports consumption, profile the behaviour of fans, and translate these insights into relevant product features.

One striking insight emerged from our research: unlike football and most other sports, where fan loyalty is primarily directed towards a club, in volleyball, the emotional connection is mainly with the athletes. These athletes are pivotal in attracting new fans to the sport. Through their interactions during major events like the Olympics and on social media, they help transform casual viewers into dedicated volleyball fans. This was the opportunity we needed to explore and leverage.

Considering the emotional connection with volleyball professionals identified in the research, we designed an experience aimed at bringing fans and athletes closer together.

We wanted a solution that truly engaged the fans, and this premise guided our decisions. For gameplay, we chose to implement the Daily Fantasy model, which ensures competitiveness from round to round without point accumulation or currency valuation. Additionally, we brought the familiar collectible player sticker albums into the digital world, offering fans the chance to win cards of their idols at the end of each round.

With renewed chances of victory each round and the promise of collecting their idols in a virtual album, Cravada successfully addressed its initial challenge of providing not only entertainment but also a new and engaging point of contact between fans and the sport.

For the visual aspect of the game, I developed a clean, intuitive interface with a simple color palette to maintain neutrality and implemented a dark mode interface to set Cravada apart from other fantasy games, which typically use light backgrounds. Once everything was established, I created a comprehensive design system to ensure consistency across all elements of the game and included guidelines for typography, icons and interactive elements.

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For the player cards, I worked closely with our developer to create a flexible system in which the cards would be created automatically on the product's admin panel so as to avoid the manual labour of creating hundreds of customized animated cards. This system associated their team colours and player positions to pick the background for each card, along with the player's photo and attributes.

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The implementation of our design strategies led to several positive outcomes:

• Neutral Brand Identity: Successfully maintained product neutrality with a carefully chosen color palette, avoiding any association with specific teams.
• Distinctive Interface: The dark mode interface distinguished Cravada from other fantasy games, enhancing user experience and engagement.
• Efficient Player Card System: The automated creation of player cards streamlined the process, reducing manual work and ensuring visual consistency.

Designing Cravada required innovative solutions to balance neutrality, usability, and visual appeal. By developing a unique interface, a comprehensive design system, and an efficient player card creation process, we successfully created a fantasy volleyball game that celebrates the Superliga and engages a broader audience. This was proven once we saw the impressive numbers from the first month onward, highlighted by a high retention rate that confirms the product's appeal.