Fanatics Sportsbook Retail
(0→1 Product Design · Retail · Sports Betting · Omnichannel · Complex Systems)
Role
Role
Product Designer, sole designer for Retail
Timeline
2022 – 2025
Scope
0→1 product design, UX/UI, prototyping, design system, design QA
Surfaces
Self-service kiosks, teller tools, customer-facing displays, odds boards + venue experiences
Overview
Retail Sportsbook was Fanatics Betting & Gaming’s first product to launch 🚀 🥳.
I joined as the third designer at the company and became the sole designer dedicated to Retail, working closely with my PM to build the experience from 0→1. What started as a single sportsbook at the Commanders Stadium (FedEx Field/northwest Stadium) grew into a product I owned for more than three years across stadiums, sportsbooks, casinos, and retail locations around the country.
My work spanned the entire retail experience, including self-service kiosks, teller tools, customer-facing displays, live odds boards, venue screens, and the design system connecting them.
01. Building our first sportsbook from scratch
When I joined Fanatics Betting & Gaming, both the product and the organization were still being built.
Retail gave us a lower-risk way to enter sports betting before launching the mobile app across multiple states. We could start with one physical location in Maryland, learn from real customers, and prove there was an appetite for a Fanatics sportsbook.
There wasn’t an established retail product, mature design system, or playbook to follow. Sports betting was also new to me, so I learned the industry while designing the product alongside a very small Product, Engineering, and Operations team.
As the sole designer on Retail, I owned the experience from early flows and visual design through prototyping, design QA, launch, and the years of improvements that followed.
02. Designing around the hardware we already had
One of our first constraints had already been decided before I joined: the hardware.
Fanatics had purchased dual-screen betting kiosks before the product experience had been defined. Both screens were touch-enabled, but giving customers two separate places to navigate risked making an already complex product even harder to use.
Working across Product, Engineering, Operations, Marketing, and Design, we defined two different roles for the screens.
The angled lower screen became the lean-in experience, where customers browsed sports, explored markets, built bets, managed their bet slip, and completed transactions.
The upper screen became the lean-back experience, supporting what was happening below without competing for attention. It started with promotional and venue content and later expanded into pre-built parlays and richer betting discovery. I also began exploring live game context like play-by-play, lineups, injuries, and game data.
It created a very different design problem from mobile. More engagement wasn’t always better. A kiosk is a shared physical resource, so we had to balance giving customers useful information with keeping them moving through the experience.
03. Designing the entire retail ecosystem
A few months after launch, Retail expanded beyond the self-service kiosk.
The teller experience shared the same core journey customers were already using to browse sports, explore markets, and build bets. Rather than creating an entirely separate product, I was able to extend the system I had already built with an additional operational layer for the employees running the sportsbook.
Tellers needed everything customers had access to, plus tools to manage transactions, vouchers, customer accounts, cash drawers, reprints, cancellations, bet limits, and trading approvals.
I also designed the customer-facing display that worked alongside the teller. As a wager was built, customers could verify their selections, bet type, wager amount, potential payout, balance, and FanCash earned before confirming the transaction.
What started as a self-service betting experience became a system that could support both sides of the counter without requiring two completely different products.
Beyond the transaction itself, I also designed live odds boards and other digital surfaces throughout the sportsbook, extending the experience from the kiosk into the physical venue around it.
04. Growing the product alongside Fanatics
Once Retail launched, the challenge changed from building the first version to evolving it alongside a rapidly growing sportsbook.
The mobile app launched soon after and began moving much faster, with a larger team and more engineering investment. Customers increasingly moved between digital and physical Fanatics experiences, creating new expectations around loyalty, FanCash, account access, and consistency between channels.
Over the next three years, I continued owning Retail while improving navigation, search, event pages, futures, the bet slip, home experience, player limits, pre-built parlays, and the ways Retail connected back to the mobile sportsbook.
I also maintained the Retail design system and used feedback from operators, tellers, customers, and our live venues to continuously improve the product.
By my final year on the team, I had started rethinking the experience more broadly around everything we had learned since launch, including a larger redesign of the kiosk and its relationship between the two screens.
What began as Fanatics’ first sportsbook at a single stadium had grown into a retail platform supporting 25 locations across the country.
