Context
FUTBIN is an essential online platform for FIFA Ultimate Team (FUT) players. With a user base of over 10 million, it serves as a comprehensive database, offering detailed information on every player and card in the game, crucial for building and optimising teams. FUTBIN also provides real-time market data, allowing users to track prices and trends for effective trading.
This functionality is key for assembling competitive teams within a budget. Additionally, the platform fosters a vibrant community where users share strategies and advice. FUTBIN is not just a tool; it’s a vital resource for FUT enthusiasts seeking to enhance their gaming experience.
😕 However as it has many users, it also has what seems like endless features, ads and ways to navigate both the app and web.
Goals
Better Collective acquiring FUTBIN was an important step in reaching the ambition of becoming the leading digital sports media group. With every acquisition comes a lot of unknowns, both about the product and the user. And though the FUTBIN team remained with us, they had no designers or UX researchers and it was the previous owner’s passion project, run solely by developers. The task for me and our new designer was:
- Find out who the user is and what their pain points and needs are
- Discover existing issues on all key pages and screens (UX Review)
- Find out what we need to do to optimise the product and UX (the initial stages brought us several hypotheses that led to more research)
- Find out what the user thinks of our news section and how we can bring more revenue through it (over 90% of revenue was through ads previously)
Methods
Since the project was rather big and there were only two of us in the beginning (this was before the team grew to its current size), the designer and I divided our work so that he covered analyzing Google Analytics and doing UX reviews, while I did surveys, in-depth interviews, card sorting and different types of usability tests. Here’s some of the things I did:
- A survey where we surveyed over 1000 users with a popup on the homepage to find out the basics: how often they use FUTBIN and why, and how old they are. I then used this data to segment them and dig deeper, asking further questions such as what they really appreciate on FUTBIN and what frustrates them (this was to confirm GA and Heatmaps data), which social media chanels they use, what they value in News…
- In-depth interviews – I interviewed 10 people to confirm survey data, and further investigate what bothers users the most VS what they would never change on FUTBIN, and why they prefer the app or the website.
The survey and interviews gave us some data to help us generate several hypotheses/conclusion to further test and work on:
- There are too many ads, they are difficult to close and sometimes completely irrelevant
- There is an overflow of features and content, difficult to get around
- Inconsistency with the app, but also different ways to navigate and do stuff on mobile website VS desktop website
- We lack a strong TikTok presence (our user base is very young)
- Too many ways to navigate to certain pages/screens and frequent bugs
- A lot of positive feedback too: turns out we have the most up-to-date player prices, excellent X (ex-Twitter) presence, a really good admin everyone respects greatly
This gave us a clearer idea of what to work on next:
Card Sorting + GA with the new realisation that users are unsure how to navigate and where to find each feature, as well as the fact that most of them reach our web pages through searches. We wanted to see what makes sense to go together to our users, so I did an open card sort and had users group all our features into categories that they named themselves. This gave us a lot of “I have no idea what this is” groups too! After this we picked some of the most repeated topics and ran a closed card sort as well to confirm with a new set of users and avoid bias.
This led to us creating a more focused and clean navigation design on the web, which was further tested with:
- Moderated prototype testing with 5 users to set them in real life scenarios and check how they find things in the new navigation.
- Apart from all this as this is an ongoing project, I have also done numerous unmoderated as well as additional moderated usability tests and have created a user panel for the product to be able to get participants faster and do more efficient research.
Impact (that I’m allowed to share 😅)
The changes we made based on this research lead to:
- Simpler navigation
- More returning visitors
- Better TikTok presence that resonates with our young audience , even stronger X (former Twitter) engagement
- Larger traffic on News pages
- Kicked off a project to make navigation and content more consistent across our app and website pages
Kind words from FUTBIN’s product manager
My feelings about this project
I was the dedicated researcher from the UXR team for FUTBIN for over a year, and in that time what I’ve enjoyed the most is how dedicated their user base is. At other products I worked on it was often times difficult to get users to participate in research, but here it seemed like everyone really cared for what happens next to FUTBIN and was willing to talk to me, which allowed me to do what I enjoy the most: uncover new insights through research.
Neda Đačić - UX Researcher 