Introducing Fantasy View on YouTube TV, a new way to track your fantasy football team
Oct 15, 2020 – [[read-time]] minute read
From the ability to rewatch key plays and catch up to a game live, hide spoilers from your favorite team, or check out real time stats from the game you’re watching, the YouTube TV team is always working to design and build innovative features that are changing how our members watch live TV.
Today, we’re excited to be expanding this suite of interactive features with the introduction of Fantasy View. With Fantasy View, you can link your NFL.com fantasy account to YouTube TV, so you can effortlessly check how you’re stacking up in your fantasy league while you’re watching the games live.
We’re bringing you behind-the-scenes with our design team to see how Fantasy View came to life, from talking with sports fans themselves and our first sketches, to the YouTube TV fantasy experience that launches today on Android and iOS. Here was our game plan:
With Fantasy View, you can quickly check your team’s current score, or dive deeper with more stats from individual players and from around the league.
Pre-game analysis: Learning from the people who know sports best
Before even sketching initial ideas on paper, last year, we met with sports fans for some serious inspiration on their own turf: their living rooms. We wanted to see how our members watch live sports from the comfort of their own homes and saw that they’re often multitasking - checking player stats, following scores from around the league, rewinding to rewatch an awesome play, and tracking their fantasy team’s performance.
It became clear early on that fantasy sports wasn’t just a niche hobby, but a different way to engage with live sports:
Fantasy players are information hungry. They sought the most current stats and player info to stay up-to-date on their team’s performance, often keeping their phones nearby while they watched so they could constantly check for updates and get notifications about their favorite teams and players.
They’re looking for more ways to engage with sports. Playing in a fantasy league often deepened fans’ involvement in the season and made watching sports more enjoyable.
Participating in fantasy leagues is an easy way to connect with people. Many fantasy players we talked to said it helped them feel closer to their friends, family, and co-workers.
Here, we mapped out all the information you can find on fantasy apps.
Kicking off: Identifying opportunities early on and brainstorming our design principles
With these foundational research insights in mind, our team of designers got right into the action and built their own leagues on popular fantasy apps. We analyzed the entire journey for a fantasy player, from setting up a team, managing it week-to-week, and watching games live.
Once we mapped out that information, we grouped the most relevant and frequently checked stats to highlight during games.
We identified opportunities to enhance the overall fantasy experience by improving the hierarchy of data, while making sure our experience felt familiar enough that fantasy players could easily jump right in, with the ability to quickly scan player performance plus get an overview of your matchup and others around your league. From here, we started to map out and rank all the key information that fantasy players needed to understand their performance.
Based on this, we decided on some key design principles for the feature: be flexible, informative and effortless.
Before moving to digital tools, designers sketched ideas on paper. Here’s an early iteration of preliminary explorations of Fantasy View.
Drawing up the plays: Sketching out our initial design concepts and building the product
Once we settled on our design principles, it was time to sketch out our design directions. We explored different ways fantasy players could access information, ranging from a team-focused view, game-focused view or a live feed of mixed content. We wanted to present information in a more dynamic manner so you could access stats and info that were relevant to the game - similar to our Key Plays or Stats Views.
We didn’t want YouTube TV to replace the fantasy apps that people relied on and enjoyed, but instead augment and deliver a more integrated viewing experience while they watched football.
Scoring the touchdown: Bringing Fantasy View to your phones for game day
We took those first design directions, plus the initial insights from our user research that fantasy brings more enjoyment to sports, to hone in on some key features and finally bring the experience to life.
When you explore Fantasy View during a live game, which is available on Android and iOS devices to start, you’ll see:
A live feed of the current scores in your matchup plus your projected total points,
A quick look at players on your team - and your opponent’s - that are playing in the game you’re currently watching so you can see how a recent play may have impacted your score immediately,
A comprehensive view of how your entire team is performing in your matchup overall,
And an overview of all of the matchups in your league.
Football fans, we can’t wait for you to try out Fantasy View for this weekend’s games, starting at 1 p.m. ET Sunday on CBS and FOX. Let us know your feedback!