Syndicate League

OVERVIEW

Project Duration: 7 weeks

Syndicate League is a new game of The National Lottery that incorporates current games and mini games to encourage teamwork and develop a social aspect to syndicate play. It incorporates the lottery results, with every correct ball earning the teams points as well as having something to do in the app while they are waiting for the draw.

BACKGROUND

The design brief was centred around encouraging users to engage with The National Lottery results journey. Initial research showed that players didn’t feel any excitement when playing any of The National Lottery games as they already believe that they aren’t going to win.

Target Users

Syndicates generally have a limited interaction with the lottery itself, with only the leader taking an active role. Research showed that many of the members didn’t check the results, opting to wait and be told by the leader. Many of them played as part of a group of co-workers or friends with one member taking the active role, collecting money, buying the tickets and in charge of any winnings.

 APPROACH

This project was a team project, working with live clients in order to solve an issue that they currently have with their product or service. We used the double diamond framework as a guide throughout.

• Discover - uncover a group of people who don’t engage with the national lottery results journey.

• Define - understand why they don’t engage with the journey and find opportunities for a solution.

• Develop - ideate a solution that would solve the issues and accomplish the user’s tasks as well as the clients requirements.

• Deliver - create visuals of the solution, and present the project and the proposed concept to the clients.

Throughout the whole project we kept a blog of our progress. We were in constant contact with our clients, gathering feedback on research and ideas before presenting the solution to them and other members of the organisation at their headquarters.

The Team

This was a team based client project, working with our clients in order to create an innovative solution to engage syndicate members with the results journey.

I collaborated on each area of the project, however my key roles within the team were client liaison, user researcher, graphic designer and presenter.

DISCOVER

Briefing

After we were briefed by Camelot, we wrote a Project Direction Report, which detailed our proposed area for the project, the target user group, what research methods that we would potentially use. We discussed the proposal with our clients, who agreed and made a plan of action.

Secondary Research

We looked into different areas that are related to The National Lottery, gambling and game play.

• Anticipation

• Ethics of gambling

• Syndicates

• Gamification

• Digital trends

Primary Research

The target user group we chose to focus on were syndicate members who don’t engage with the lottery. The research methods that we used were:

Research Questions

There were a number of key areas that we wanted to find out about and some key questions.

We wanted to:

• to discover the process that syndicates go through when playing the lottery, their motivations for playing and how they feel when they play.

• to see how useable the current experience was to players who had never played before.

• to see the differences in the levels of anticipation between first time players and occasional players.

• to discover what current players feel and say when they play, whether they win or lose.

• to see how players interact with the current experience, from buying the ticket either in-store or online to checking the results.

DEFINE

Synthesis

Once we collected all the data, we used different methods to visualise the data and to help identify an opportunity to implement a solution that would increase syndicate members levels of engagement. we combined it to make an affinity diagram, empathy maps and customer journey maps. We also created a stakeholder map which would help us to think about everyone who is involved in the current experience, and give us a better idea of the context as a whole.

Key Insights

We analysed the data to create some insights, which we developed into some interesting key insights that we decided to focus on. Some of the key insights include:

• A common motivation of members to join a syndicate is that there is a higher chance of winning the lottery. Other motivations include social reasons, curiosity and want to jump on the band wagon.

• Syndicate members tend to play 2-3 times a week, sometimes on different games in the week. Syndicates that play more tend to play the cheaper games, whereas those that only play once a week play the more expensive ones.

• Syndicate members don’t check the results themselves and wait for the leader to tell them. It takes a long time to go through each line to see if they have won anything.

• Once a member joins the syndicate, they tend to stay in because they don’t want to miss out if they win. There is little effort needed by the members as they just pay their money and choose numbers.

• Syndicate members become disillusioned over time when they don’t win anything. They might be encouraged to play if they know where their money is going to to things like good causes.

Design Opportunities

We created some How Might We statements that would help us later in our ideation.

Some of these statements were:

• Visualise the results journey to make it more interesting to all players?

• Encourage collaboration in an engaging way that motivates anticipation?

• Increase competition / gamification element between users?

• Make players feel like they are winners even if they haven’t won a monetary prize?

• Give the syndicate members a sense of ownership rather than just the syndicate leader?

We decided upon a final HOW statement that combined some of the previous ones.

HMW encourage togetherness between syndicate members to enhance their anticipation with the lottery results journey through the use of competition, gamification and ownership?

DEVELOP

Ideation

We used the crazy 8s method to create several initial ideas that we could use as a base for a concept. Each team member did the activity separately, and then we discussed all of them as a group. We used a voting method to decide upon which ideas we liked the most, and discuss whether we could combine some elements in order come up with an innovative solution.

We evaluated the concepts against the pain points that we uncovered from the earlier stages of the project and asked several of our target users if the proposed idea would make them more engaged with the results journey.

Customer Journey Maps

We updated the customer journey maps from the earlier stage to include the proposed concept in order to see where it would fit within the current journey.

Experience Map

We created a proposed experience map, showing what are users would be doing, thinking and feeling throughout the journey.

DELIVER

Lo-Fi Wireframes

We created a number of lo-fi wireframes and compared the different versions. We voted on which parts of each we liked the most, and then created a prototype to show our target users to gather their feedback.

Hi-Fi Visuals

We took feedback from our target users and created some visuals, keeping in line with The National Lottery branding guidelines, of a select number of screens to showcase our idea.

Presentation

We presented our project and concept to our contacts and also members from the digital team, marketing and development. This was a valuable experience and we gained positive feedback on our process, design and concept.

After the presentation, we were lucky enough to get a tour of Camelot’s headquarters, getting to see inside the winner’s room, seeing the original machine, Arthur, and also have a demonstration of how the lottery machines work.

Features

• There will be two types of accounts. As a member, you will be able to; see the numbers that have been chosen for your syndicate, have access to leaderboards, play mini games, which include head to head battles again other syndicates, collect badge, collect individual prizes, contribute to syndicate prizes and check the lottery results. As a leader, you will be able to do everything that members can, as well as; buy the tickets online and choose level of privacy (public and private play).

• Syndicates will be separated into different leagues depending on the number of players. There will also be an overall league that will include every syndicate, however the total points collected will be divided by the number of players to give an average number of points, making it fair across the league.

• Head to head battles will use current games that The National Lottery have in their Game Store, however they will not cost any money, but each player would have a limited number of ‘plays’ before they need to wait. Syndicates will be paired off within their league for a week long ‘battle’. To make it even the syndicates will have to be within 50 points of each other to be matched up. This will create anticipation because there is a chance that the lower team could go ahead in the table by the end of the week.

• Points will be awarded to players when they play the mini games, but the main points will come from the lottery itself. You will gain 20 points for guessing a correct number on your chosen lottery game, and 10 points for the bonus ball. Prizes will be awarded as individuals with bigger prizes for the syndicate which will be a group experience or can be traded for other prizes.