All Work

GridRival

Driving conversion, paid participation, and growth in a regulated gaming product

Summary

Led design strategy on a US-based, regulated fantasy sports app to improve verification, deposits, paid participation, and retention at a critical growth stage.

Delivered 2x the requested conversion target, 25% YoY retention growth, improved App Store rating from 3.4 → 4.6, and helped establish a clearer growth narrative that supported GridRival becoming the official fantasy sports app for IndyCar (2025).

Team
  • Me — Lead Product Designer, working directly with client CTO and CEO
  • Senior Product Designer (sprints 2 and 3)
  • Internal Developer (sprints 2 and 3)
  • Chief Product Officer (sprint 3 — product discovery and analytics review)

Across three design sprints.

Responsibilities
  • Auditing the experience to identify growth blockers
  • Defining a prioritised impact-vs-effort roadmap
  • Leading multi-sprint design initiatives across onboarding, picks, and navigation
Context & Challenge

Demonstrating Traction Now to Supporting Continued Investment

GridRival is a US-based fantasy motorsport gaming app operating in a highly regulated, state-by-state environment. Before our engagement, the product had scaled quickly but accumulated UX friction across onboarding, navigation, and conversion metrics were half where they needed to be. From a business perspective, the stakes were explicit: Improving conversion and paid engagement was critical to demonstrating traction and supporting continued investment.
GridRival needed to:
  • Increase verification rates
  • Improve first-time deposits and paid game participation
  • Convert existing free users into paid players
  • Increase bets per user without adding complexity
  • Improve retention and repeat entries
All while:
  • Moving quickly
  • Avoiding large engineering rewrites
  • Operating under regulatory constraints
Audit artifacts
Approach

Audit → Prioritise → Execute

Given tight time and budget constraints, I ran a time-boxed two-week UX audit to quickly identify where design could deliver the most impact.
The audit drew on:
  • Best practices from comparable gaming and betting products
  • Competitive analysis
  • Early behavioural data (where available)
Findings were assessed across business impact, design effort, and development complexity, allowing us to clearly separate quick wins from larger structural improvements.

This audit not only prioritised the work — it positioned design as a strategic partner early on, building trust that led the CTO to bring the CEO directly into product discussions.

Key Decision (1/3)

If users didn't verify early, we lost them — so we redesigned onboarding around it.

Data showed a strong correlation between early verification and paid participation. This made it clear that verification needed to happen during onboarding — not later in the journey.

To give this the best chance of success, we focused on both timing and relevance:

  • Integrated verification directly into onboarding, aligning it with moments of highest intent
  • Introduced lightweight personas to tailor messaging by user motivation, tone, and entry point
  • Systematically removed friction from verification and onboarding flows through clearer steps, progress indicators, and feedback
  • Aligned deposit flows across payment methods to reduce confusion and build trust
  • Increased visibility of rewards tied to verification and deposits

This approach improved near-term first-time conversion, while also establishing a repeatable framework and shared language for targeting specific user groups in future initiatives.

Persona A
Onboarding screens
Key Decision (2/3)

Quadrupling play options without increasing complexity

This was one of the most challenging decisions in the project. The goal was to dramatically increase the number of ways users could play — without making the experience feel heavier, slower, or harder to understand.
Stripping the experience back revealed that the existing navigation model was the limiting factor. A familiar internal pattern, inspired by a competitor — but one that:
  • Encouraged unsupported behaviours
  • Required excessive scrolling
  • Reduced visibility of drivers and teams
  • Limited opportunities to increase bets per user
To unlock growth, I proposed a fundamental restructuring of the picks experience:
  • Organising picks by play mode, not by driver
  • Showing all drivers within each play type, aligned to the underlying rules
  • Increasing visual prominence of drivers, teams, and actions
  • Clarifying selection states to make choices more confident and engaging
While this was a non-trivial shift, the impact was clear:
  • Reduced perceived complexity
  • Increased confidence when placing bets
  • Encouraged play across multiple drivers and teams
  • Created space to surface referrals and promotions that had previously been hidden

Rapid prototyping of real user scenarios was key to alignment. By showing how different categorisation models mapped to actual play behaviour, we were able to gain buy-in for a major structural change.

Picks components
Picks structure
Key Decision (3/3)

Picks was already winning. We made it impossible to miss.

Analysis showed that Picks was clearly outperforming other paid game modes.
Rather than adding new features, we focused on removing friction and making the most successful behaviour unavoidable.
Key decisions:
  • Removed a low-value Home screen and promoted Picks as the primary entry point
  • Made Entries immediately visible so users could see impact without digging
  • Making Picks promotions within Leagues more explicit
We also introduced more celebratory win moments:
  • Animated win states
  • Clear sharing affordances
  • Stronger social proof
This helped turn wins into moments worth sharing, supporting organic growth and referrals.

Presenting solutions with clear trade-offs and future opportunity allowed leadership to make faster, more confident roadmap decisions. Showing this impact early helped unlock greater near-term change.

Navigation options
Learn and earn
Outcomes & Impact

Results that exceeded even the most ambitious of targets

2xThe requested conversion target for paid user growth
25%YoY retention growth
3.4 to 4.6★Increase in App Store rating from 2023 to 2025
IndyCarBecame Official Fantasy Sports App for IndyCar in 2025
While exact figures were confidential, the work delivered clear, directional results across conversion, retention, and user sentiment. Internally, this work clarified the growth story, increased confidence in design-led decisions, and created a scalable foundation for future optimisation.

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