Sports Betting and GDPR

Genius Sports is a global sports data and analytics platform that has partnered with a wide range of leagues in Europe and across the world. Their whitelabel sports betting platform, Betgenius, is also well-known and popular throughout Europe.

As an associate UX strategist, I lead a project to research, test, and implement a General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliant user data consent interface to be built into all of Genius Sports products. I also worked with the head of research to design a customized, in-house UX audit and research system to be taught and shared with the rest of the UX team.

Research

When one hears the term “user data,” most people fall into two groups; either they are indifferent to companies collecting their data and don’t care to understand how it’s used or distributed, or they’re very protective over what personal information about them is collected, who it’s shared with and why. Since the large data breaches recently at Equifax, Yahoo, eBay, and Target, more and more people have shifted from the “I don’t really care about my data” group to “I’d rather not have any companies know or track what I do online,” thus creating an interesting challenge with GDPR looming in the distance.

As explained by one of the stakeholders with Genius Sports when I asked what success will look like for this project, he said “being able to retain enough user data to allow us to retarget them after they’ve used our products, and not getting fined out of existence.” The increased accountability that companies are now facing when it comes to data is now also met with the threat of very heavy fines through the EU if any of the many data regulation guidelines are not met sufficiently or executed appropriately. As we worked remotely with a legal team based in London, we came to understand the details on how all companies must protect and distribute user data in the future, along with the penalties for not doing so. No matter the size of the company, they can be subject to pay anywhere between €10 million or 2% of worldwide revenue of the previous year of business operations, or up to €20 million or 4% of worldwide revenue of the previous year or business operations, depending on the severity of the infraction.

With the stakes set pretty high, my project owner and I worked together on understanding every aspect of how to tackle the oncoming GDPR regulations. We needed to understand all of the ins and outs of the regulation itself, which we took care of on conference calls twice a week with our team in London. We also needed to dig deep into the attitudes users have towards data and how they feel about sharing it. Retaining user data was paramount in our ability to retarget users on other sites. Without their permission to drop a cookie in their browser, we would have no legal way to draw them back into our betting platform. Testing our ideas were a big step in the research phase as well. Being able to quantify the behavior of users when faced with accepting our request to handle and retain their data was not something we really wanted to leave until after GDPR already kicked in. Any insight we could get on retaining user data would mean more returning traffic to our product once we crossed the GDPR deadline, and thus more revenue opportunities through our sports betting platform.

IDEATION

DECK AND WIREFRAMES

I also collaborated with our designers to put together a deck explaining what Genius Sports was doing to tackle the upcoming GDPR rules, and designed a few wireframes depicting the user consent requesting process. In here you will find mockups and an example user flow diagram.

Genius Sports Research Strategy

Working alongside our head of research, I helped analyze different popular research methods in order to devise a strategy to initially audit and evaluate Genius Sports’ line of products. What we decided on in the end was to use sort of a hybrid research method, combining the PURE Method, which measures “user friction” while using a product, and Kano Analysis, which measures user satisfaction and emotion in regards to individual features.

Our focus:
-Product evaluation/audit of current GS products
-Define what we mean by value/usability
-Create a way to capture/measure that through broad form of evaluation
-Focus on value and usability, not visual design

Solutions:

1. PURE Method and Kano Analysis.
PROS
-Qualifies how difficult a product is to use, uncovers friction
-Multiple insights from experts
-Easy to understand at the end to deliver
-Quick and cheap
-Easy to adopt and learn
-Great way to determine what features work or not
-Provides qualitative info to complement quantitative info from PURE
-Can tailor questions to fill in gaps that PURE doesn’t cover

2. PURE Method and Google HEART Framework
PROS
-Adds multiple categories to measure, not all necessary for every project
-Measures emotion and key metrics that aren’t included in PURE