quickBets

inspiration

My team and I initially all bonded over our love of sports. While we didn't exactly share the same flavors, we could all appreciate the cool moments and genuine passion that goes into the biggest entertainment engine in our lives. We considered many different options, from bioinformatics and real time data on football players contact points, to sentiment analysis about soccer games and how likely a game was to cause actual riots in a city.

After the prizepicks talk though, we were sold. We realized during the speech and after conducting user research, the driving motivators for our love of sports were the cool movements, the passion, and the fierce competition. Prizepicks hit all of these fault lines, and more. We initially built our app as a companion to PrizePicks, but as we fleshed out our future set we grew to much, much more.

We realized the opportunity to foster community just as much as individualized competition. We leveraged mySql to create a fully fledged database to store user data and populate a feed page that shows opinions and takes from trusted people in the sports scene globally. We took this idea further, creating a live chat feature that would allow users to see in real time what their fellow fans thought of the game and the bets being placed.

While building out the chat feature, we found the UI to be bland, almost as if we were dancing around a gaping whole in our design process. After getting user-feedback (including prize-pick's front-end software engineer, thank you Gabe!) we realized we were missing those trusted voices, and so added a live commentary feature over which anyone with enough rep in the community could start a livestream and explain their thought processes and bets to people around the world.

We encountered many challenges over the course of our design and implementation process. React native when combined with typscript was a truly unique beast. We felt the uncanny valley effect sharply as we interacted with a technology the seemed so similar to our skills yet so different at the same time (views rather than jx fragments, nativewind...), and typescript forced us to constantly develop with data validation and protection first