During Week 9 of the 2024 NFL season, the Seahawks hosted a Corgi Cup-themed game, featuring a halftime race where eight corgis dashed across the field as fans cheered for their favorites. To enhance fan engagement, the digital team decided to build a free-to-play game allowing fans to predict the winning corgi and automatically enter a sweepstakes if their pick was correct.
Client: Seattle Seahawks
Role: UX Designer and Promotional Support
Collaborators: Seahawks Marketing, Game Entertainment, and Production Departments
Image via Seahawks.com.
As the UX lead on this project, my responsibilities included:
To establish best practices, I conducted a comparative analysis of similar prediction-based games and fan engagement activations. I examined:
The Seattle Mariners' Salmon Run scoreboard, displaying racer fun facts.
From this research, I identified key engagement drivers:
These insights shaped the game’s structure, design, and promotional strategy, ensuring maximum fan engagement and a seamless voting experience.
With my research insights in mind, I collaborated with our free-to-play game vendor to design and build the experience. Previous live polls were limited to three voting options, so expanding to eight choices while maintaining a clear, user-friendly UI was a top priority.
I worked closely with the vendor to:
The final scoreboard layout, created by our vendor and I.
One standout insight from my competitive analysis was how bios and fun facts about the racers increased fan engagement in similar games. Since the mobile voting UI and scoreboard had limited real estate, I determined that the best solution was to create a dedicated webpage to highlight the corgis.
The Pick-A-Pup webpage, displaying fun facts about each racer.
To build this, I:
This additional layer of content enhanced fan engagement, allowing them to connect with the racers and making the Pick-a-Pup experience more immersive.
Since fans needed to submit their votes before the races, we launched a week-long promotional campaign to maximize engagement—ensuring participation from both in-stadium and at-home fans.
To promote the game, I:
The app homepage card for the Pick-A-Pup experience.
Since fans needed to vote before halftime, real-time game-day promotion was critical. I worked closely with the game production team to ensure:
This ensured that as many fans as possible had a chance to enter before voting closed.
The high returning user rate on the facts webpage and survey feedback confirmed that fans valued the extra context before making their pick, enhancing their overall engagement with the experience.
While the Pick-a-Pup experience was a success, I identified several areas for future improvement to make it even more engaging and accessible for fans.
This was a fun and rewarding project that brought together our free-to-play games vendor, gameday presentation and production teams, and graphic design team to create a unique fusion of digital engagement and in-stadium entertainment.
By combining halftime entertainment with an interactive fan experience, we successfully bridged digital platforms with on-field action, enhancing fan participation in a way that was both engaging and informative. The Pick-a-Pup game showed how a playful, well-designed experience can increase fan investment while keeping them entertained before, during, and after the event.
Image via Seahawks.com.
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