Search
(B2C · Sports Betting · Search & Discovery · Information Architecture · Design Systems)
My Role
Sole Product Designer · 0→1 Product Design · Interaction Design · Prototyping · Design Systems · QA
I partnered closely with Product and Engineering from initial concept through launch, then continued owning and evolving Search for three years. I also collaborated with designers across Sportsbook and Core as Search expanded into their areas of the product.
Overview
When you know what you want, you shouldn’t have to hunt for it.
Sportsbooks have a lot of content. A customer looking for one specific bet might have to go from sport, to league, to event, to market, just to find what they already knew they wanted.
Search gave them a shortcut.
I designed Fanatics Sportsbook’s first Search experience, giving customers a way to find sports, leagues, teams, events, and eventually individual markets and player props without navigating through the rest of the app.
With few sportsbook precedents to follow, we looked outside the industry for inspiration and built a flexible foundation that continued expanding for the next three years.
Search became one of the most consistently praised parts of the Fanatics Sportsbook experience, repeatedly earning recognition from customers, executives, reviewers, and independent industry benchmarks.
01. Building search without much to copy
At the time, sportsbook search wasn’t really a thing yet.
Bet365 was the only sportsbook we found with Search, so there wasn’t an established pattern we could follow. Instead, my Product partner and I looked at search everywhere. Google, shopping apps, content platforms, trending searches, search history, animations. If one of us came across an interesting search experience, we sent it to the other.
The tricky part was figuring out what Search needed to understand. Someone might type a sport, league, team, player, event, or the exact thing they wanted to bet on.
We kept the first version focused on the basics: sports, leagues, teams, events, main betting lines, and an A to Z list of sports for people who wanted to browse.
I also didn’t want Search to feel like a completely separate part of the sportsbook. I started with event patterns customers already saw throughout the app and adapted them into a more flexible Search card. That gave us something familiar to start with and, more importantly, something we could keep building on.
02. Getting customers straight to the bet
Finding the right event was helpful. Finding the actual bet was better.
If someone searches “LeBron points,” they already know what they’re looking for. Sending them to the Lakers game and making them hunt through all of its markets doesn’t really solve the problem.
So Search grew beyond finding destinations.
Searching for a team could surface its team page, upcoming games, and available bets. Searching for a player could show their player page alongside relevant points, assists, rebounds, three-pointers, futures, and other markets.
Customers could then add a bet to their betslip without ever leaving Search and keep looking for whatever they wanted next.
Of course, it still had to behave like the rest of a sportsbook. Odds changed. Markets suspended. Games went live and eventually ended. Instead of inventing new Search-specific behaviors for all of that, I used the patterns customers already knew from the rest of the app.
03. Starting simple so we could keep adding to it
Search got a lot bigger, but we never had to start over.
Our MVP was intentionally lean. Over the next three years, we added player props, alternate lines, futures, live game data, player imagery, event notes, trending searches, recent searches, type-ahead, sport filters, quicklinks, and more.
There were also a million little edge cases.
People misspelled player names. Teams had nicknames and abbreviations. “New York” could mean a dozen different things. Golf and tennis didn’t behave like football or basketball. Some leagues allowed us to show player photos and others didn’t. Markets could disappear while someone was looking at them.
We built rules and fallbacks for all of it.
Because the original components were flexible, most new features could fit into the system we already had. Eventually Search became a pretty well-oiled machine. We could keep adding to it without constantly redesigning what was already working.
04. Realizing people wanted to search for everything
Eventually, customers started telling us what Search should become just by using it.
Almost every query was sports-related, but every once in a while someone would type something like “help,” “deposit,” “withdrawal,” or “FanCash.”
Technically, those searches were wrong. But they also made complete sense.
If a customer thinks Search should be able to help them find something, why make them learn where we decided to put it?
We started expanding results beyond sports to include things like help and support, promotions and boosts, loyalty, deposits and withdrawals. We also explored bringing Fanatics Casino games into the same experience.
Search also became more useful for customers who didn’t know exactly what they wanted. Trending searches showed what was happening now, recent searches helped people jump back into something, type-ahead made common searches faster, and sport filters helped narrow down ambiguous results.
We also worked toward a “no dead ends” rule. Even when we couldn’t find a result, we tried to give customers somewhere useful to go next instead of leaving them at a blank page.
What started as a shortcut to find a bet was slowly becoming another way to navigate Fanatics.
