Making B/R Social

After completing the ground up redesign of the B/R app, the next phase was to further build out our sports ecosystem. Since sports are inherently social, and B/R content and alerts are a common starting point for sports conversations, the lack of social functionality was driving users to other platforms to have those conversations. If we wanted to retain users in our walled garden, we were going to have to give them the tools they needed to create and maintain relationships on our platform, instead of anywhere else.

How might we better connect users with their friends and communities inside the B/R app? How might we provide the functionality that would allow users to not just consume great sports content they are passionate about, but share it with their own community?

B/R is known for having the fastest alerts in the game. They are contextual, timely, and give you everything you need to stay up to date with sports and culture. As we developed our social strategy, we saw a clear opportunity to take alerts to the next level. We know that alerts are the jump off point for conversations and connections, so what can we do to help those conversations happen  inside of our app?

PROBLEMS

• Sports new originates on BR, but conversations happen off platform

• Sports are full of Social Currency, need for communities

• No default place where sports conversations happen

• Alerts had no media, could not be previewed before navigating away

• Inability to react or comment on content

• No easy way to know when you had social activity

Discovery & research

• Onsite interviews - Ages 20-30 - Casual and frequent users
• Usability tests - Tested Fire reaction - Comments design - DM location / flows
• Social habits - Which messenging apps and why? - How do you talk about sports?

• “My coworkers and I all have B/R alerts on and when something happens while at work, we all get hype and start chatting about it”

• “I usually default to Facebook groups because there is nowhere else I can have a group chat around sports content with my friends”

• “Wow! I LOVE this fire button! I just want to keep pressing it!“

• “Having the ability to react or comment is really important. Sometimes I don’t want to talk, but still show my support by reacting”

• “I like having DMs central to my app homescreen. It’s easy to jump in and out of conversations that way, and, it’s similar to Instagram, so that’s a plus”

Reactions

• Give fans the ability to react

• Conversation feed optimizations

• Mute / Block / Report

• Profile page

• Verified profiles to support AMAs

Alerts

B/R is known for having the fastest alerts in the game. They are contextual, timely, and give you everything you need to stay up to date with sports and culture. As we developed our social strategy, we saw a clear opportunity to take alerts to the next level. We know that alerts are the jump off point for conversations and connections, so what can we do to help those conversations happen inside of our app?

• Allow conversations to happen around sports moments

• Evolve Alerts beyond text-only

• Add social functionality to Alerts

• Create feed of social activity

1. Alert Comments + Reactions

As users began adopting to comments in the app, the need to quickly access those conversations became increasingly apparent. Since you could see a friend’s comment on a track in a feed, or on an Alert Card, why couldn’t you see a friend’s comment from the Alerts tab? It seems like an  obvious fix, but at the time, it wasn’t the most loved idea, simply for the fact that it was starting to make Alerts become much more than just links to go read breaking news somewhere else. However, seeing a friend’s comment surfaced under an alert in your Alerts tab, 

2. Alert Card

The next feature we came up with was a modal, or alert card, that would preview the content and social activity, without leaving the Alerts tab. This drastically changed how Alerts functioned in the app, and gave users more control than ever when previewing content or quickly replying to a comment. 

3. Activity Tab

Once the social features began settling and users were adopting to them, connections were being made, arguments being had, and chat threads were rewarding the best comments with comment reactions. But if a user leaves a comment that gets 5 fires or 500 fires, how would they know? Unless they manually navigated back to where they left the comment, it was difficult to know what kind of reaction their comment was getting. 

Direct Messaging

• Privately message friends or groups of friends

• Make all content shareable

• Enable conversations from anywhere

• Launch feature and optimize user adoption and engagement

RESULTS*

These enhancements to Alerts not only drastically changed how Alerts function in the app, but were also huge boosts to growing our social platform. These numbers continue to grow much higher today.

* Results as of 10/2019

Alerts

• 1.5M accounts created in the first 12months (MUCH higher today!)

• 2.7M monthly active users (MAUs)

• 217K reactions MAUs

• 6.5 reactions per social MAU

DMs

• Average number of DMs sent per user: 19

• 44K unique users sent a DM

• 167K direct messages sent (10/2019 - 02/2020)

Thank you!