COUPANG PLAY SPORTS IS THE ONE AND ONLY SPORTS STREAMING PLATFORM IN KOREA USED BY THAT DELIVERS EXHILARATING SPORTS-WATCHING EXPERIENCE
Play Sports is serious about sports experience. The whole company strived to provide streaming service of various sports leagues such as the English Premier League, La Liga, K League, MLS, F1, Davis Cup, NHL, NFL, ONE Fight, and many more.
Our dedication extends beyond mere streaming. Play Sports has taken serious steps by hosting numerous soccer and baseball matches in Korea, featuring world-renowned teams like the New York Yankees, San Diego Padres, Tottenham, Manchester City, Paris Saint-Germain, Atlético Madrid, and Sevilla FC, to name a few.
The matches captured widespread attention in Korea, offering fans the unique opportunity to witness world-class players in action beyond the confines of their screens. The competition for tickets was intense, with seats selling out within minutes. Additionally, these events set new records for the number of live stream viewers and newly subscribed users. Such events and sports content have been significant victories for our product, revealing the immense potential within Korea's passionate community of sports fans and streamers.
Despite featuring exciting sports and leagues, our app struggled to engage our sports enthusiasts due to delivering some exceptional sports content through a poorly designed app experience. The user experience for sports was merely an extension of the SVOD content structure, failing to recognize that sports users have distinct characteristics and needs compared to SVOD users. Consequently, the sports product was neither suitable nor effective for sports content, falling short of meeting the expectations of sports users.
DATA ANALYSIS
In order to define the problem more clearly and set up the metrics, we needed to gain more context. We started with taking a look into some data points.
The highest traffic came in when there was a big match, and almost the same number of users who visited for the match left when the match was over. The more popular the content was, the higher peaks the graph drew. We saw the peak of the graph as an opportunity. We saw a potential of increasing many of our key metrics If we could lock some of the users who came in during the peak of the graph.
USER RESEARCH
User Journey
To lock those users, we needed to learn more about them…
We picked some users who have watched soccer match from our app at least once and up to more than 8 times in the past month. I conducted a user interview where I asked them about their sports watching experience from the beginning to the end. Through the research, we could clearly see the common user journey pattern and define the characteristics of different user types. They were classified in to three groups based on the frequency of the journey happening.
This is the common user journey of most sports users. Depending on the frequency of the journey, we classified the users in to three different segments which were non sports fan, casual sports fan and super sports fan. Our goal was to push users down the funnel by gradually converting non sports fans in to casual sports fans, and converting casual sports fans in to super sports fans.
IMPACT
Through out the year we have aggressively grown our sports MAU, the top of our funnel.
Ever since the launch of first project, sports MAU has increased from 0.1M to 2.1M.
Check out the following projects to see how we lead the sports MAU growth with UX improvements
Next Project : Sports Scheduler
