How to make your users fall in love with your product?

Foosio is a fantasy football app where you can create your dream team and compete with others based on real players’ perfomance and outcomes.

The main challenge was to give the user the most freedom possible within the team creation process. So unlike other fantasy games we let the user play around with their team's formation, avoiding predefined ones that are difficult to change in later steps. Users have their own strategy for team creation and we don't force them to follow predefined steps. After all, we built a game and not a tax form :-). During tests users selected three or four favourite players, and then they started to think about the formation. They filled up the empty positions at the end. This flexible process set us apart from our competitors.

Another challenge was to create a fun, detailed and engrossing game that would not turn into math homework. We wanted to let the user focus on the main interaction and rather than on calculating statistics while preparing for the game, because the most exciting part of ‘Foosio’ is when users create their team, searching for the right combination of 11 football players. There is a limited budget and each potential teammember has a different value. Users focus on finding underdogs: those footballers who cost less but bring more points. At this point we show them not only their remaining budget but also the average budget left per player. They don’t need to waste their time crunching numbers. It is a simple calculation for the programmer, but it lets the users focus on player selection.

Another critical interaction within the game is when users change their minds and want to swap one of their players for a better one. At this point, show them both the new possibilities and keep the replaced player as a sticky element. They don’t need to remember the name, average points and value of their current selection.