Design This Day | Episode 2

How data, design, and dopamine are reshaping sports betting.

Jessica Spiegel joins Teague Futurist Devin Liddell to talk about sports betting, the future of fan experience, and how to make data visualization fun. Jessica is the Vice President of Product Design at Fanatics Betting & Gaming. She previously played a key role in shaping digital experiences at HBO and Amazon.

Scene: You and your friends jump to your feet. The whole stadium is celebrating. Your glasses nearly fall off, but you're caught up in the moment. Your team just scored the winning touchdown. A notification flashes across your vision.

“Live bet. What color will the Gatorade shower be?”

It's your augmented reality glasses at work. You nudge your friend grinning. He sees the wager too. With a quick gesture each, you place your bets. You choose purple, he chooses orange. Your glasses show the odds shifting as more people join in. Then your glasses zoom in on the sidelines. The players are huddling. Someone grabs the cooler, what will it be? The coach flinches as a tidal wave of bright purple crashes over her head. Your friend tosses up his hands in exaggerated defeat as you pump your fist. This is the future of sports and entertainment. Welcome to Design This Day, a podcast about the future, the futures we want and the people working right now to make those futures real. 

Devin Liddell: Before we jump in, let's hear from Jessica on why her career in sports betting came as a surprise even to her.

Jessica Speigel: I've done a lot of different things. I do not love solving the same problem over and over again. It is no fun to me, I find that boring. And so I've always been trying to chase the next thing. In the early internet it was e-commerce and then went into lots of flash work. It was all flash all the time and-

Devin Liddell: Nice.

Jessica Speigel: I know, right? I'm aging myself here horribly.

Devin Liddell: I'm there with you, so it's good.

Jessica Speigel: Okay, good. Whoo. But the thing that was so interesting about HBO, in particular, is you're designing a multimodal experience. It's like TVs are not things that a lot of people get to design for. And then with betting and gaming, at the point I had been at HBO for seven years and one of the guys that was on my team at HBO was actually the first design hire at Fanatics Betting & Gaming. He was hired as a principal product designer and he was like, "You have to meet the leadership here. It's amazing." I was like, "Really?" Because, and I'll admit this, I judged the books by the covers. It looked like a lot of sports guys doing the thing.

And I had a conversation with the CPO, I had a conversation with the CEO and I was so impressed because what they were trying to do was build something better for customers. Because the thing that's really interesting about sports betting apps right now is that they all follow what's been established in the UK, Australia since it's been legal there for so much longer. And they're not super great experiences. It looks like a spreadsheet. I remember the first time I opened it up and I was just like, what am I looking at? But they were really interested in changing the face of sports betting.

In 2022, these new sports betting apps were powerful, but they were not that user-friendly. The spreadsheet interfaces were in desperate need of a redesign.

Devin Liddell: Sports betting, you can bet on things like who will win a game, what the final score will be, or even more specific details like how many points a particular player will score. The odds are set by sports books such as Fanatics. Jessica joined Fanatics in 2022 when legal sports betting was still relatively new to the scene. Gambling in horse and dog racing had been legal in many states for years, but most types of sports betting was still banned until 2018 when the Supreme Court decision struck down the ban. Like many activities, sports betting quickly moved online. You can now bet on almost any sport no matter where you are, as long it is legal in your state. In 2022, these new sports betting apps were powerful, but they were not that user-friendly. The spreadsheet interfaces were in desperate need of a redesign. Jessica knew that industry outsiders like herself could provide the fresh perspectives needed to push the industry into new territory.

Jessica Speigel: Our CEO very intentionally hired people 50% from the industry and 50% from out of the industry on purpose. Even though obviously it took some of us a little bit more time to ramp up, you're going to have a much more diverse team, you're going to have better, longer lasting ideas, et cetera. Diverse teams come up with better ideas.

Devin Liddell: Exactly, full stop. That should be the primary motivation actually.

Jessica Speigel: Totally.

Devin Liddell: People I think mistake it as some feel good story. No, it's actually-

Jessica Speigel: No.

Devin Liddell:... totally-

Jessica Speigel: Business imperative.

Devin Liddell:... business imperative. If you want great ideas, you need diverse teams. That's it.

Jessica Speigel: Yes, exactly.

Devin Liddell: Not complicated. And I don't want to keep stepping back too far, but I do love that you compared, you described a lot of what you do as problem solving. I'm curious, what is the biggest user experience problem you're solving within sports betting?

Jessica Speigel: At Fanatics, we need to help people find bets and then you want to research, so the stats piece of it that's implied in finding a bet. But you hone in, you find the thing that you want, you do a little bit of research to make sure that it's a good choice that you're making and then you convert on that content. You make a bet on it and then you track it.

Devin Liddell: I like the phrase good choice by the way, when it comes to betting too, it does seem like intuition, hunches, those seem equally or as powerful, I should say, as data. The data says that I should bet this way, but my hunch says I should bet this other way. And my guess is that most people go with their hunches and that also taps into the entertainment part of it as well. You're not entertained by cold data necessarily.

Whether you are placing deeply researched bets or just making a wager for fun, this interactive engagement has the potential to gamify other aspects of life.

Jessica Speigel: Right. But that's where I'm almost showing my support a little bit too.

Devin Liddell: Whether you are placing deeply researched bets or just making a wager for fun, this interactive engagement has the potential to gamify other aspects of life. This is something I've thought about a lot in my work as a futurist. Gamification could be applied to our carbon footprints, making sustainability fun and measurable and even competitive. Gamification could be applied to personal health, driving us to make healthier choices so we can win. Gamification could even provide the dopamine necessary to make not so fun necessities like doing household chores, more entertaining. And we are not there yet, but I can also imagine formal betting culture extending into the entertainment space. Jessica says this kind of betting among friends is already happening in informal ways.

Jessica Speigel: We had so much fun last Super Bowl because the Travis and Taylor relationship was new. And so we were like, could you bet on what color lipstick Taylor's going to wear? Really open it up, what's she going to wear? All of these things. And it was so much fun. We actually did it, it was a quick sprint around. There was like a possible partnership and we were looking at more pop culture integrations because people already bet, there are pools on Grammy's and Oscars. And so I think it's that fun with friends aspect.

Devin Liddell: Interesting. I like that. I can see that if there's more casual betting available to us and it enriches the experience of things we're already seeking entertainment from, then that feels somehow more comfortable to me as a future than, say, just wildly more people betting on-

Jessica Speigel: Just betting on sports.

Devin Liddell: ... sports, yeah.

Jessica Speigel: 100%. Because I think it's like putting money on it is just a stand in for how strongly you feel that you're right. You know what I mean? And so it's almost like a gavel in that respect. It's like I believe this. You know what I mean? And so I feel like that's where it gets really fun. I will not speculate on the regulations and how one would actually do that, but that would be the main pushback that one would get.

Devin Liddell: Right. I don't know if we want a scenario where we're betting on whether our flight leaves on time because that might open the stuff up.

Jessica Speigel: Maybe you hedge that. Maybe you're hedging getting to your meeting on time and then you're, I guess it doesn't matter because-

Devin Liddell: I won no matter what.

Jessica Speigel: Exactly.

Devin Liddell: I was late, but I knew we were going to be late.

Jessica Speigel: Right, right. Exactly.

Devin Liddell: I'm sure there's lots of listeners who would associate gambling with a vice.

Jessica Speigel: Totally.

Devin Liddell: Just like with any vice, doing it in moderation is the key. How do you approach that from a design standpoint?

Jessica Speigel: What it comes down to is if someone develops problem gambling habits, it's not good for us, they're not a customer anymore. In the same way we were talking earlier, diversity is a business imperative, responsible gaming is also a business imperative. Because we want to keep people having fun and being entertained within their means and so the way that we handle that, we have really extensive controls. The way that I've always thought about it is before you go out drinking for the night, you're going to make a plan for your transportation. You should do that before, don't leave that until the last minute.

If someone develops problem gambling habits, it's not good for us, they're not a customer anymore...responsible gaming is also a business imperative.

And so responsible gaming is kind of the same way. You can set a deposit limit per day, week, month. You can set a time limit per day, week, month. And so then the app will start to nudge you when you're getting close to that, when you've passed it. And it's not like you can't outsmart ours like you do your phone. If you set limits on your phone for Twitter or something and it's, you hit your limit and it's like extend for 30 minutes. You can't do that with responsible gaming controls.

Devin Liddell: Good, okay.

Jessica Speigel: There's a cool off period. If you change them, you cannot change them again for 24 hours.

Devin Liddell: Innovators face the challenge of balancing good design with business imperatives, which isn't always easy. For sports books, good design helps the user place well-informed bets and provides entertainment value all while keeping the user from engaging in compulsive gambling behavior. It's a balance rife with potential pitfalls and I wondered whether it was possible for sports betting to create an overall benefit for those involved. I asked Jessica about the best-case scenario and the worst case scenario for sports betting in society.

Jessica Speigel: I think the utopian version is where these things are bringing joy and excitement and entertainment and an extra layer to the things that you already love, whether that's your social circle, your favorite sports team, whatever. I think the dystopian version is where it's only transactional, it's like how do I extract as much value as humanly possible from you from this? And as an aside, and I am being completely earnest about this, this is why I went to work for Fanatics is because it's not just betting. It's the entire sports ecosystem. I don't need to keep them betting for us to make money, it's the whole package. The incentives are aligned with the customer and so I think the intention is more pure, for lack of a better word. It's just like your heart is in the right place instead of how do I extract from you.

Devin Liddell: Exactly. Well, that's a very interesting take on it. And it also speaks to something that's hard to pin down about the joys of sports, which I think you're getting at, which is there is a purity in terms of being a fan.

Jessica Speigel: Totally. It's very raw.

Devin Liddell: It's one of the reasons why, for example, it's very difficult to switch being a fan from one team to another. If not impossible.

Jessica Speigel: I'm still upset about the Sonics. I'm mad.

Devin Liddell: Right.

Jessica Speigel: ... still.

Devin Liddell: Exactly. And I like the way you put it in terms of a utopian way; there's something additive about it. It adds to the experience of being alive. And if it's extractive then it has stepped over some kind of line.

I like the way you put it in terms of a utopian way; there's something additive about it. It adds to the experience of being alive. And if it's extractive then it has stepped over some kind of line.

Jessica Speigel: Yeah, it has to be additive. Have you seen the Knowledge Navigator video that they did at Apple?

Devin Liddell: Creating technology that is truly game changing is often tricky because it can be difficult to see past existing limitations. Jessica mentioned a video that Apple released in 1987. The video showcased a futuristic device called the Knowledge Navigator. The so-called Knowledge Navigator was essentially a tablet that could understand complex spoken commands, facilitate video calls and organize your calendar. Remember this was an idea that Apple put out there in 1987. What was then entirely a corporate science fiction is now part of everyday life.

Jessica Speigel: It's basically the iPad with an AI assistant. It took 20 years or however many years, no one do the math, no one do the math, but it took that many years to come to fruition. I don't think we need to go that far, innovation is on a much shorter timeframe now. But I think those types of exercises are so valuable because, and this is my big problem with the industry right now is that, everyone's so busy chasing each other. It's like you're chasing parody and no one is ever going to switch to another product because of a parody feature. It's literally never going to happen. You're never going to leapfrog if you keep trying to do what your competitors are doing.

I think we're getting to the point now in our maturity that this is the right time. I always talk about you solve a problem for a person, not what they ask for, but the thing that they think can not be changed and they're going to love you forever. Remember when the first iPhone came out with visual voicemail, I shelled out $700 for that phone because I could tap on the voicemail instead of having to listen to them in order. And it's like we need to find our visual voicemail of sports betting. There's one example, this actually doesn't come from the design team, this comes from the trading team. But one big problem that sports betters had is injuries. And obviously you can't avoid injuries, it would feel deeply unfair when someone, let's say they had a parlay that included someone. Someone goes out in the first quarter or whatever and it sucks because then your whole parlay is blown. That's lame.

Devin Liddell:
A parlay in sports betting is a single wager that links two or more bets together. Parlays usually offer higher payouts, but in order to win you have to win all the bets in sequence within that parlay.

Jessica Speigel:
And so what we do, we have a policy called Fair Play, and the Fair Play policy is awesome because it just voids that leg. It's like, oh, the person got hurt in the first quarter, it's as if that never happened, your parlay is still good. And people love this because it's like, yeah, you're still in the game. Stuff like that. Finding problems like that and solving them, that really gets people to switch and stay.

Devin Liddell:
One of the problems Jessica mentioned at the beginning of our conversation was that of data visualization. Placing a bet on sports betting apps previously required looking at multiple spreadsheets. There have been improvements and the experience is much more user-friendly now. But I wanted to know what will data visualization look like in the future? Jessica believes augmented reality or AR will play a role.

Jessica Speigel:
It's going to include AR. I feel like it's going to be a whole different ballgame. I hope I'm right here because I will tell you what I want to see.

Devin Liddell: Let's wager on it.

Jessica Speigel: I'm happy to. The end state that I imagine is I've got something in my glasses and I can activate whatever layer in my glasses. Why this hasn't moved further also is another thing that I just like... I'm sure we'll get it eventually. But my watch, my phone, my glasses, all of the things and I can activate whatever layer in my glasses. And this is a podcast, so I'm tapping my glasses.

Devin Liddell: I can see it. She is, she's tapping her glasses.

Jessica Speigel: But I can overlay some layer. Let's say I'm at a basketball game, I can overlay some layer that puts, subtly, odds, stats, whatever attached to the people who are doing the things in real life. Then I feel like you're in a whole new world with data visualization because I have that for real time. But let's say I'm doing some analysis instead of looking at my phone or interact with my computer, I'd rather it just be in front of my vision here. And then I can talk to it and have it change in my vision instead of we think about all these overwrought gestures. I feel like the combination of better screen technology and natural language is going to change all that because then you just don't need all of the manipulation anymore because it's like I'm interacting with it naturally like I would a person showing it to me instead of having to do it gesturally with my hands.

Devin Liddell: Right. This is purely anecdotal, but one of my kids is actually interested in the Ray-Ban Meta collaboration.

Jessica Speigel: Oh, cool.

Devin Liddell: And so I said to him, I said, "Well, what's the use case that you find most compelling?" And yes, I do talk to my kids that way. My son said, and this surprised me because I thought it would be visual. But the use case that he was most compelled by, it was the one you mentioned first, was the ability to have the glasses on and hear things that others could not hear him listening to.

Jessica Speigel: Oh, that's so interesting.

Devin Liddell: He doesn't have earbuds in, so it's auditory. But I think that dovetails a little bit with where you went with it, which is that there is an interesting relationship between how we visualize data and how hearables could be a source of some richness that we haven't quite mined yet. Okay, cool. I did want to ask you though, are there industries that should borrow from you? Meaning should healthcare visualize its data along the lines of sports betting? Would that be more compelling?

 there is an interesting relationship between how we visualize data and how hearables could be a source of some richness that we haven't quite mined yet.

Jessica Speigel: Maybe? I don't know.

Devin Liddell: I look at my chart.

Jessica Speigel: That chart is a mess. It's a mess. I actually said this just as an aside, I was talking to my doctor once and I was like, "God, I would love to fix your software." And he looked at me with dead eyes and he was like, "You really don't. Don't work in healthcare." And I was like, "Oh my God, what did they do to you?" Oh no, we'll talk about that later.

I was just like, oh. But no, I think the thing that, and this makes me upset about how people treat customers just in general, but people underestimate customers all the time. They're like, "People don't read, people aren't going to pay attention to that." It's, sure if they're not interested in it, but you give them something that they're interested in and they will devour literally every piece of data on it. And so there's this tendency to oversimplify and hide. And I think people should just give customers more credit. If they want a thing, give them the thing and give them all of the information about the thing. Sure, use progressive disclosure, but don't condescend.

Devin Liddell: Right. I love that. Maybe as a quick follow on to that, are there lingering educational hurdles that you have to at some point tackle to get the next audience archetype who isn't currently betting but would actually get a lot out of it if they understood X better or if they felt more comfortable with Y? Are there any things like that?

Jessica Speigel: I think so. And I think getting over information overload, that's the big thing. It's like, oh my God, what do I look at on this screen? Because betters, they are more, or I should say less sensitive to lots of stuff on the screen than most people are because I would say they're more experts. They're looking for a specific thing and it's like, okay, I want the complexity. If I was looking at a stock market thing, I would want all of the information, don't hide the complexity from me. But still, if it's not the information that you need right there, it is going to be in your way. And so as we have more and more data in the future, figuring out ways to really simplify that. And that's where I feel where technology is starting to go with natural language, you can just really get a lot out of there because it's just, okay, what do you want? I want to know what X stat is on this player and show me over time. And you can just describe it real quick instead of having to navigate to it.

Devin Liddell: Is that a future state of sports betting? They would actually just use natural language and say, "Hey, Siri, put 50 bucks on X, Y, Z for me.

Jessica Speigel: Yeah, totally.

Devin Liddell: Okay.

Jessica Speigel: Exactly. I think there's a long way to go and I've realized I didn't give you my caveat. My opinions are my own and nothing is on the roadmap and yada yada, yada. But I feel like that's the big opportunity is how do you make that easier and more natural, especially if you're in-person. You don't want to be on your phone messing around with your app when you're also trying to enjoy the game.

Devin Liddell: Right, exactly. Now we have to move into the speed round.

Jessica Speigel: Okay.

Devin Liddell: The first one is, what's your take on the most overhyped technology?

Jessica Speigel: It's definitely VR. And I will tell you I feel bad because I was never bullish on it. And I know that I'm biased because I was never good at 3D modeling anything, that just was not the thing I was good at. And the headsets also made me nauseous. Everyone was going through the VR phase at the same time and I was just feeling alone because I'm, I hate this, I hate this.

Devin Liddell: And what do you think is the most underhyped technology?

Jessica Speigel: We talked about AR a bit earlier, the potential of that is so great. I think that once we get to a place where the technology is more in service of the human experience, we'll be in a place where that type of technology can really take hold.

Devin Liddell: What's an innovation in another industry that has inspired you to think differently about your work?

Jessica Speigel: We're looking at gamification all the time. Duolingo is the example. They're so good at rewarding people for doing a thing, maintaining your streak. People get weird about their streaks too, which is fun. You could get to the point where there's someone paying attention to your habits, nudging you if you're going outside of them. It's beyond just the limits, oh, here's some patterns you might want to pay attention to. Obviously there's a long way to go before we can trust AI with all of this, having to be supervised, all of that stuff. But it's a little clunky still, but I feel like the idea is sound.

Devin Liddell: Interesting. Do you have a book or a show that you are reading or you've just read or you're watching or you've just watched that's influenced how you think about your role as an innovator?

Jessica Speigel: Totally. And I'm so glad that you asked this question because this is a little bit of an older book now, but are you familiar with Jane McGonigal's Reality Is Broken. Video games, they know what make us happy and her whole thesis is that everything could leverage those same mechanics to make life more fun. And not just to make life more fun, but to make everyone more productive too. And one of the examples that she gives was, and it's actually from the University of Washington, which was so fun because that's where I went to school, but one of the biomedical researchers, they were using distributed computing to do brute force protein folding to find new combinations. This was in 2008 or something. And people who downloaded the screensaver, they would see options. They were like, oh, I could see how you could fold this in a different way, but I can't interact with the screensaver. They ended up making it into a game called Fold It. And it's so cool because people ended up working together on all of these different protein folding combinations.

But the thing that's so neat about that, I think for me, because I wake up, I do the Wordle, I do the Connections, all my friends do it, we text about. It's like, what if we were all doing some game that solved climate change? You know what I mean? And so thinking about how you can use those game mechanics of challenge, fun, all of these things, side quests, blah, blah, blah, just in work, in everyday life, cleaning the bathroom, things you don't want to do, it could just make everything so much better. That's what I always come back to as a designer and just as a personal philosophy is, how can I bring joy here? It's not always possible, obviously, but it usually is even a little checkbox you can make it satisfying to click. There's little stuff that you can do.

Devin Liddell: Well, thank you so much for being here, Jessica. It's been fantastic. Really, really lovely.

Jessica Speigel: It's been a very fun afternoon. Thank you.

Devin Liddell: That's it for today. Thank you for listening to Design This Day, a podcast by Teague. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app so you don't miss the next episode. We have some really exciting guests coming up. I can't wait to share more with you next time. And if you have a complex problem that needs solving, we'd love to hear from you. Visit us at teague.com or send us an email at hello@teague.com.