MOBILE EXPERIENCE
Jan 2026 - May 2026
WalterPicks
Project Overview
prototyping
ux research
Competitive analysis
Tools/Skills
Goals
Deliverables
With a clearer understanding of user behaviors, social dynamics, and trust factors in sports betting, we can move forward with more intentional feature ideation for WalterPicks.
This research helps ground our design decisions in real user needs rather than assumptions.
With a rough feature list complete and a better understanding of what competing apps offer, we can make better-informed decisions when ideating features for WalterPicks.
We interviewed 9 people who had previously bet on sports, aged 18- 32, about topics such as:
Confidence in bets
Betting experiences
Fantasy Football experiences
Social betting communities
After interviewing participants, we found commonalities throughout.
These included:
Participants desire a larger community presence
Motivation to bet is for entertainment & potential profit
Communities become toxic
due to excessive competition
Users are interested in
enhanced social features
Based on the insights gained through our interviews, we developed two personas. Our personas, ‘Jake’ and ‘Tyler’, represent typical sports bettors.
Jake represents a more casual sports bettor, prioritizing easy and low-risk betting.
Tyler represents a more serious sports bettor who is more willing to participate in high-risk, high-reward bets.
These personas capture key characteristics, user goals, needs, and pain points to guide design decisions throughout the project.
Takeaways
Current Features:
The current features of the app work well and as intended.
Social Features:
A lot of users may leave the app in search of social features such as messaging and live chats, so that is one area the app could improve.
Grow User Base:
With sports betting being a very saturated field, there needs to be more ways for the app to stand out and grow its user base.
To begin this activity, we conducted Crazy 8’s and brainstormed on a whiteboard. This activity allowed us to brainstorm and throw out ideas that we might not have previously thought of. We continued using the categories we had narrowed down from our competitive analysis and feature takeaways to ideate more.
Once our sketches were complete, we created an affinity diagram to find commonalities and narrow them down into categories.
We narrowed down initial sketches to five potential features to develop further in low-fi prototyping that we felt offered the strongest potential for shareability.
Following our sketching, we had a good idea of what features we wanted to develop moving forward. This gave us confidence and direction as we moved forward in the design process.
Now that we had five solid conecpts, we moved into concept testing before furthering the wireframes. We aimed to test our low-fidelity sketches/designs with users to better understand pain points and areas of improvement.
For each of these features, we asked participants to describe their thoughts, what they like, what they dislike, their ease of understanding, and how likely they would be to use the feature.
Takeaways:
Simple Features: Participants wanted features to stay simple while having customization capabilities.
User Discouragement: Users feel discouraged when losing or being presented with negative statistics that highlight shortcomings.
Prioritize Shareable Screenshots: The shareable screenshot feature received strong support from interview participants and sponsors. This also has the potential for quick integration into the app.
Following the testing of our low-fidelity wireframes, we were able to better understand specific areas of improvement and identify strengths and weaknesses. This will guide future design decisions to incorporate into our mid-fidelity prototypes.
This screenshot shows a matchup between two college teams playing in March Madness.
It shows the live score, which team users bet on, WalterPicks’s confidence in each team to win, each team’s record, and sportsbook odds for each team to reach the final four.
Takeaways:
Share Information:
Shareable Screenshots provide users with a versatile new tool to share information with others.
Usability:
Shareable Screenshots can be used through group chats, messages, and social media.
Greater Discoverability:
Increased attention to the WalterPicks app through greater discoverability.
Expansion:
Opportunities to expand features across more pages/sports, allowing more communities to use.
Building off of our low-fidelity prototypes, we will map the user journey with the new features in order to design mobile wireframes. After user testing these high-fidelity designs, we will finalize our prototypes.
This screenshot shows upcoming games. In the banner, the sport (NBA) and bet type (moneyline) are displayed.
Games, their win% odds, and EV edge are shown in a table format, allowing users to share multiple prospective bets.
EV edge percentages are colored using a gradient, with higher percentages shown in green and lower percentages shown in yellow.
Any performance over 12.5 will be shown in green over the dashed line. Any performance under will be visualized in grey.
This allows users to visualize how often a player has hit his line.
This screenshot shows how many points a player scored in their last four games.
Sorted in reverse chronological order, this informs users on recent scoring performance allowing them to make educated bets (over/under x points, etc.).
This screenshot visualizes data of a player’s Last 5, Last 10, Season, or Head-to-Head stats for a given prop.
Head to Head will only show games where this player has played the opposing team he will play.
Users can toggle over or under on a prop to see the past performances on a graph.
The graph has a dashed line which marks the set prop
Throughout this project, I worked with my team to research and improve the social experience within a sports betting and fantasy sports app. This was not a field I had much experience in and I dove into learning the ins and outs of sports betting.
I contributed heavily to research, user and feature analysis, journey mapping, and feature ideation before helping us identify shareable screenshots as our primary design opportunity.
I then helped develop the feature flow and high-fidelity mobile prototype, collaborating with my team to create a solution that made it easier for users to share their experiences and engage with others.
This project taught me how important it is to balance user needs, business goals, and technical considerations when designing a real-world product.
I learned that a strong UX solution does not always require creating something entirely new; instead, small improvements to an existing experience can create meaningful opportunities for engagement. Working on an industry sponsored project also gave me experience collaborating within real-world constraints and communicating design decisions as a team.
Most importantly, this project helped me become more confident in taking research insights and turning them into a focused, actionable design solution. Throughout the project, I had the opportunity to explore research and design methods that I was not previously familiar with. This project allowed me to expand my UX vocabulary and create meaningful designs and prototypes for the WalterPicks team.
Christina Hittle · UX Designer
Available for thoughtful collaborations