Boosting the Football Away Days App Experience

The client

The Premier League is the highest level of the English football league system. It is responsible for the sport’s competition, Rule Book, and the centralised broadcast of the game, as well as other associated commercial rights. 

Our brief 

Premier League away days have suffered a 10% decline in attendance over the past five years. Possible explanations for this downturn include factors such as rising ticket prices for fans, as well as a lack of information regarding places to drink and dine, as well as travel routes, commute pricing, and parking.

With this in mind, Future Platforms was asked to create an application that could remedy this, keeping fans up-to-date about all the aforementioned details of their potential football away days. 

The app would have to support every stage of the away day journey, from ticket information, journey planning, and travel updates, as well as guides on stadiums and grounds to special offers from the various competing clubs. Other important features also included fan-made reviews, ratings and recommendations, as well as info on scores, team news, substitutions, and potential travel disruption.

What we delivered

Before designing the actual Premier League Away Days app itself, we wanted to get into the mindset of football fans and understand what kind of issues they faced while planning and embarking on football away days. 

To that end, Future Platforms ran several fan workshops in Manchester, Newcastle and London. Here, we developed a solution that put their needs at its heart and considered every element of the away day adventure from dawn to dusk.

Alongside comprehensive stadium guides for all 20 clubs, we included detailed travel information, tailored matchday offers, and a directory of the best places to eat, drink, stay and park during football away days.

Then, we used Agile delivery methods to focus on the priority features and updates for users and the business. We planned and scoped out the features, and conducted the initial design for the app in-house in collaboration with a Product Manager. We also conducted workshops with key stakeholders within the business, such as content creators, editors, and designers. This collaboration meant that the Premier League was always engaged with our production team and could provide detailed feedback throughout the development process. 

After five weeks, we designed an app product that fully met the client's requirements and included push notifications when users came close to key away day locations. These notifications provided helpful info on the stadium and its nearby environs, as well as other practical tips, reviews, and FAQs designed to help boost user engagement. 

Future Platforms maintained a close collaboration with all third parties throughout the lifecycle of the Premier League Away Days project, especially during the planning phases, to ensure alignment before development commences.

Support

We had a maintenance and reporting contract in place since first undertaking the project. This included regular reporting on the performance of the apps, all integrations and SDK’s. This highlighted potential updates well before they became critical, ensuring they were planned and delivered in the most efficient and cost-effective manner.

The maintenance contract included SLAs covering response times and target service restoration. These were covered by service credits should we not respond or deliver to expectation but were never enacted.

Major feature releases during our contract included:

• 215k: Downloads across iOS and Android
• 2.4m: App sessions since the start of the 2014-15 season

86k: Tailored matchday offers served to travelling supporter