Refer A Friend
(Growth · Acquisition · Sports Betting · Promotions · B2C · Mobile · End-to-End UX)
Role
Senior Product Designer · Core Product
Sole designer for Refer a Friend, partnering closely with Product, Engineering, Marketing, and Customer Service. I owned the end-to-end experience across discovery, sharing, referral status, progress tracking, and the evolution of RAF into a more flexible system.
Overview
Refer a Friend was already live when I joined Core, but the experience was still a relic from our MVP.
That was becoming a problem because RAF had the potential to be a valuable acquisition channel. Instead of paying to reach every new customer, existing customers could bring their friends directly into the product.
The program itself was more complicated than it looked. A friend had to sign up, deposit, place qualifying wagers, wait for those wagers to settle, and meet the required amount before either person received their reward. Customers had very little visibility into that process, which meant a lot of confusion and a lot of calls to Customer Service.
I worked with Product and Customer Service to understand where people were getting stuck, then redesigned RAF around those questions. We made it easier to discover and share, added visibility into referral progress, and started removing some of the unnecessary rules creating friction in the first place.
The result was a referral experience that could grow as an acquisition channel without creating the same growth in customer confusion.
01. Making referrals easier to find
RAF originally lived like every other promotion. Customers could find a promo card, open the details, and share their referral link from there.
But referrals were different from most promotions. They were an inexpensive way to bring new customers into the product through people who were already using it, so we wanted RAF to have a more permanent and visible presence.
We added RAF to Quick Links (button bar on the top of the page so people can quickly 😉 find what they're looking for) on the homepage while keeping its placement within Promotions, giving customers multiple ways to find it. The Quick Link could also reflect different reward amounts, giving the business more flexibility to tailor offers for different customer groups.
The difference was much bigger than I expected.
Customers entering through the Quick Link were 131% more likely to share a referral than customers entering through the promo card, with a 28% conversion to share compared to 12.2%. When RAF was prioritized in Quick Links, new user registrations through referrals also increased 30.3% week over week, adding 1,462 new users.
Sometimes the biggest improvement isn’t changing the flow. It’s making sure people can actually find it.
02. Making an invisible journey visible
Getting someone to send a referral was only half of the experience.
There were a lot of steps between sending a link and actually getting rewarded, and customers had almost no visibility into any of them. The new customer needed to register, deposit, place enough qualifying wagers, and wait for those wagers to settle. The referrer then had to wait for their friend to complete all of it.
Very little of that progress was visible.
We had a biweekly call with Customer Service, which gave us a pretty good idea of what people were confused about. 🗣️ Did my friend sign up? 🗣️ Did they deposit? 🗣️ Which bets count? 🗣️ How much have they wagered so far? 🗣️ Does the bet need to settle first? 🗣️ Why haven’t I gotten my FanCash?
Instead of expecting customers to remember all of those rules, I wanted the product to keep track of it for them.
I redesigned the RAF experience to include referral history, individual referral statuses, and progress tracking. Customers could see who they had referred, where that person was in the process, what they had already completed, and what still needed to happen.
If something went wrong, we could show that too.
Instead of asking customers to keep the entire promotion in their heads, we let the product keep track for them.
03. Not everything needed another explanation
Once we understood why people were contacting Customer Service, some fixes were surprisingly small.
One of the biggest points of confusion was bet settlement. Customers would place the required wager and expect their reward, without realizing the wager had to settle first. Making that clearer contributed to an estimated 10,000 fewer RAF Customer Service cases early on.
Other problems didn’t need better copy. They needed to go away.
Originally, customers had to manually opt into RAF in the betslip for their wager to count. It was easy to miss, confusing, and also meant they couldn’t use another promotion at the same time.
We kept coming back to the same question: why were we making customers do this at all?
We pushed toward automatically counting qualifying wagers toward RAF and letting customers use another promotion at the same time. There were engineering constraints that kept us from getting there right away, and the change ultimately shipped after I had moved off the team, but it was always where we wanted the experience to go.
For Promotions, we wanted to be generous when we could. Making someone remember to flip a switch to get credit for referring their friend felt like more of a "gotcha" rather than being generous.
04. Making it work as RAF got bigger
Once the core experience was working better, Refer a Friend started getting more complicated behind the scenes.
The business wanted the flexibility to offer different rewards by state and customer group. New York had its own rules. VIP customers could receive different offers. Someone could send a referral from one state to a friend living in another. Casino also needed a version for customers who weren’t interested in sports betting at all.
There were a lot of ways RAF could change, but I didn’t want customers to have to understand all of that complexity.
The referral history, status, progress, and sharing patterns gave us a system we could reuse as the program grew. The team went on to launch segmented offers and expand RAF into Casino using the same foundation.
And most importantly, people needed a lot less help using it.
RAF Customer Service cases per first-time user eventually fell 53%, from 0.59 to 0.28. The team estimated that meant roughly 45,000 fewer support cases and more than $800K in savings, with RAF on pace for more than 100,000 fewer contacts and $1.8M in savings by the end of the year.
For me, that’s probably the best proof that the redesign worked 🫶 🥰.
