Cartola Fantasy Game

As you may know, Brazil is a country that loves and breathes football, and Cartola FC is the biggest fantasy football game in Brazil, played by over 2mi fans back in 2015, when Globo.com asked Fjord to team up with their own design team to revamp the app experience and think about the future of the game. Our assignment was to establish a product vision and define a roadmap for the next few years of the game, and of course redesign the mobile app, while their own design team worked on the web version of the game.

Understanding the challenge and opportunities

We started out by interviewing some current Cartola users, as well as people who were really passionate about football but didn't care too much about Cartola. That gave us a few insights on the triggers and motivators behind people's decision on engaging or not with the game, which could vary from season to season. From the get go, it was clear to us that your friends play a big part in you engaging (and keeping engaged!) or not with the game.

With all the information and some insights and hypotheses that came from our interviews, we were then able to set up a full-day workshop to communicate our insights, align on a strategy and ideate on solutions. We put both teams from Fjord and Globo.com in the same room so we could collaboratively get everyone aligned in the same vision and direction, talk about potential risks and opportunities for the project, ideate on some key features for both the app and the web versions of the game and also prioritize those ideas in a first draft of our service roadmap – all disguised as a regular football talk. It was an amazing day full of hard work and serious fun.

With the whole team well aligned on the same vision, sharing the same goals, and with new drivers to guide our solution and a solid roadmap of collaboratively prioritized features, it was finally time to get our hands dirty and start working on the brand new experience of the app.

Shaping the new Cartola FC

We started out from the beginning, by organizing the app's navigation into two separate menus (a very common approach at that time which, in hindsight, is not the best approach under current standards) to reflect the information architecture and the app hierarchy.

Then it was time to start sketching some flows and experimenting with interface elements. While some of the visual aspects of Cartola were already well stablished by Globo.com design team prior to the beginning of our project, they were more than open and kind enough to let us add a few touches and increment on their work.

This sense of mutual collaboration and openness to design critique and feedback was a key part of the process as we were two teams remotely working on the same product at the same time — long before Figma came in and introduced us to multiplayer collaboration! :) We were happy to have had this kind of relationship with such a talented team. As a result, we ended up learning a lot with them, and giving back a little bit of our knowledge and experience as well, as an exchange.

Players info at a glance

One of our biggest challenges in this project was redesigning the Player Card component. There is a lot of valuable, decision-driving information that we couldn’t just leave to a secondary page, so we designed and guerrilla-tested a few versions of the card so we could quickly get feedback and move on with our design.

Viewing and assembling your squad

At Fjord, we liked to break conventions and challenge the status quo. And we found a good opportunity to do so on the experience of assembling your squad for the next round.

Previously, Cartola featured a Marketplace section showcasing all the players from all teams, ordered by some user-configurable criteria. It was considered the most important section of the game. Well… we decided to kill it.

We figured – backed by research data – it was just easier for users to have their squads showing empty states of their open positions, so they could just tap them and have a list of all players that would fit that position – no more having to filter on a list with hundreds of players just to see the 20 possible options you have for your goalkeeper.

The Marketplace died, but that was the birth of Cartola's now most iconic screen: the pitch formation screen.

Introducing: Leagues

The new Cartola introduced a freemium model and brought to the table a new gameplay mechanic: paying users now have the ability to create short or long-term leagues to challenge and compete with just their friends. The leagues work as side-games throughout the season, to bring some freshness and an extra dosis of surprise and competition for players at the end of each round in the season. In only 3 simple steps you are able to create your league, set the rules, invite your friends and start competing for the glory.

There was also the Sponsored Leagues, that award their winners with goodies from brands like Nike and Adidas. Besides that, of course, Sponsored Leagues are a way of keeping Cartola's profitable for Globo.com, along with the paid subscriptions.

Cartola is hotter than ever!

Aside from glancing people interacting with the app and having warm discussions around Cartola at coffee shops, public transportation, bars and all kinds of places, we watched the app’s numbers at a close distance – mostly because it is a Globo.com product after all, and their metrics are a valuable business asset – needless to say most of it is confidential.

But from what we know, the number of active users escalated quickly right in the first season after launch, and so did the engagement throughout the whole season – historically, the second half of the season was always a churning point for users, as the game tended to become "repetitive and boring" as we heard in a handful of our interviews.