Kings + Golden 1 Center App Rewards System
Team: Cyrus Chau (UX/UI Designer), Sacramento Kings Dev Team
Overview
The Sacramento Kings have a tradition of deploying cutting edge technology to enhance fan experience. Kings launched a mobile app to bring basketball fan experience to the next level. Blockparty helps to bring the fan experience to live by launching The NBA’s First Blockchain-Powered Fan Token Program to King’s App with a User-centered Crypto wallet design.
Challenges
As a product designer who oversees the whole product development cycle, I work closely with business, development, stakeholders, and product owners to understand the company vision and product goal.
The whole idea of blockchain implementation into King’s app is the first step to introducing Fan Token System to Sports teams. It is a concept that’s never been done before so it’s extremely challenging to bring an advanced concept to life without intimidating users. We had to make sure the user experience is seamless yet exciting to fans as they earn more and more virtual coins to unlock rankings and rewards. There is a fine line between gamification and utilitarian approach that we wished to maintain.
Another Challenge is Blockparty’s integration to an existing app. We are responsible for creating their token wallet interface and rewards triggers to other activities in the app such as Call the Shot, food and drinks, and seat upgrades. Developing a robust system yet fitting their branding identity became a big goal for us.
Solution
To create and launch a blockchain-based Sacramento Kings Fan Token that rewards Sacramento Kings fans for engaging with the team and can be used as a payment or staking tool to participate in fan activities. Token will be able to “plugin” with the existing Sacramento Kings/Golden 1 Center app front end, integrate with the existing loyalty program, as well as other programs including Call Your Shot, Fan Hub and Smiles in the Plaza. The token wallet “plug-in” design will be as simple as any other loyalty program on the market but being supported by cutting edge technology. We aimed at providing a simple yet engaging solution to our design with seamless integration with other app activities and low learning curve.
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The design can be broken down into 4 layers: Kingscoin Purchase, Tier System, Redeem Rewards and Earn Coins.
Tier System
The Fan Token system has four tiers in total - Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum. I tried to gamify the fan experience by setting up a hierarchy for users. The more you earn, the more rewards you can unlock for better fan experience at the game. From the Benefits page, you’ll be able to see the multipliers for each rank which encourages users to climb up the ladder for higher returns.
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Also, users are able to earn more coins by completing the tasks listed in the following. This approach can boost user engagement drastically and help us to gather more user behavior data for future product iterations.
Kingscoin Purchase
Although you can earn coins by completing tasks, reaching a higher tier might be challenging to a lot of less active users. So we decided to go with a video game approach for token purchase. “The more you buy, the more you save” model could encourage users to purchase coins by money to unlock more rewards down the road. The standard purchase flow seemed to be the most frictionless approach to users to check out.
Earn Coins
I worked closely with our business, marketing, and Sacramento King’s team to design a thorough redeem program for users to gain true fan experiences via the app. Each task listed below would direct you to the task itself in order for you to complete it in the shortest steps possible with instant rewards.
Redeem Rewards
This is the most exciting part for fans. The higher tier you reach, the better experience you’ll be able to get out of your coins. Instead of showing the unlocked items from Bronze, I changed the flow to opening up the page with items unlocked with your current ranking to motivate users to redeem more appealing rewards. On the other hand, the app grays out the items that exceed your current ranking to give user incentives to climb up the ranking.
