BING SPORTSCASTER

 

GOAL

Keeping up with everything across several sports is tough. Dedicated sports websites do a good job of aggregating news, but what about something quicker and integrated into the social experience? That’s where the Bing Sportscaster bot comes in.

Bing Sportscaster bot on FB Messenger keeps you updated on the teams, players, scores and sports news you want to know. 

Conceptualized and executed on how we could aggregate and package Bing's sports content into Messenger Bot. The bot can show information about rosters, games fixtures, results, in-game information, and more. Bing Sportscaster will even predict who will win a game.

 

INITIAL EXPLORATIONS

I studied the conversation patterns across multiple messaging apps as well as FB messenger fw. Created multiple low-fi /mid-fi interaction flows for Bing Sportscaster in messenger. There were multiple bot constraints that we had to look into and map out. We wanted the responses to show rich bing content and also make sure the users understood how the bot works. We also mapped out default & automatic quick replies that would appear based on the user queries to the bot. We wanted to utilize the interaction patterns of the messaging canvas and use themes, UI, and an IA familiar to users. 

 

BOT UX DETAILING

Created multiple iterations of key bot interaction features to map the sports user flow to FB messenger UX patterns. Some of the areas shown below:

Bot_Features1.png

Sample Start UX for bot.

Sample Quick replies by the bot.

We also started doing multiple usability studies and sports features mapping to the bot. We launched an initial version of the bot for Olympics which helped us understand the data constraints and bot responses(answer cards) UX. We used the learning to add other sports scenarios and team data including NFL, MLB etc.  

BUILDING ENGAGEMENT FEATURES ON THE BOT

After the primary features of the sportscaster bot were established, we started investigating multiple engagement features.

Score Tracking: Deeper 🏈NFL season experience. Follow your favorite NFL teams and stay on top of latest news, receive live game updates and video highlights, play trivia, challenge your friends and much more.

Trivia & Leaderboard: Challenge your friends to see who can predict the game right and get more sports trivia correct.