Medium-value customers were disengaging. The business needed a daily reward mechanic to bring them back — something that felt like a moment, not another promo banner. The reference point was the casino product's existing daily reward, but Sportsbook had its own constraints.
Shipping a daily reward before NFL kickoff
Three constraints, one deadline.
- Client
- FanDuel
- Role
- Design Manager — Lead & Coach
- Year
- 2024
- Team
- Design – Corey Gilmore, Brand & Engineering partners
- AI
- Light
- Read
- 2 min
Reward MechanicsAnimationDesign Systems
Problem
Discovery
Three constraints shaped every decision.
- Timeline. Dev-complete before NFL kickoff. No room for animation risk.
- Animation tooling. Lottie was off the table after prior crashes. Rive was under engineering assessment but wouldn't be ready in time. Reanimated had just been validated for lightweight in-app animations.
- Brand identity. No name and no visual treatment when design started. 'Wildcard' arrived mid-project.
Approach
With Reanimated as the only viable tool, the reveal mechanic had to be lightweight and feasible. We landed on a card-flip — engaging enough to feel like a reward, simple enough to ship.
Placement evolved through testing. Product initially wanted placement outside the carousel, but the space was too cluttered and pushed actionable content down. The team realigned on first carousel placement with special treatment.
I coached the executing designer — a direct report new to the Generosity pillar — through real-time directional decisions while they drove visual execution. Brand gave creative latitude on the reveal style early on. The football-themed direction was reworked when Brand later requested sport-agnostic styling for campaign flexibility, then again when the 'Wildcard' name landed and visuals had to align.
Outcome
Shipped before NFL kickoff. Card-flip reveal in first carousel placement, sport-agnostic styling aligned with the Wildcard brand. A weekly variant, refined reveal animation, and jackpot-oriented styling were scoped for the next iteration cycle.
Reflections
Design system integrity is the first thing deadlines erode.
Under timeline pressure, feedback cycles shifted away from refining visual polish and toward correcting design system drift. Protecting the system in advance is cheaper than auditing it under deadline.
Late-arriving brand decisions are easier to absorb when you name them as constraints early.
We took three discrete brand pivots — sport-agnostic styling, then the Wildcard name, then visual realignment. Treating 'brand pending' as a known unknown from the start would have collapsed those into one structured handoff.
Coaching under a deadline is mostly directional, not visual.
The most valuable coaching wasn't pixel feedback — it was helping a designer new to the pillar make directional calls without me touching their file. The time constraint sharpened the feedback.
AI Integration
ChatGPT
How I Used It
Two specific uses, both upstream of execution:
- Pressure-tested the dev stack assessment — surfaced trade-offs between Lottie, Rive, and Reanimated that sharpened the engineering recommendation.
- Broadened the ideation set on reveal mechanics — generated quick-build approaches I could pressure-test against the Reanimated constraints before locking on card-flip.
Why It Mattered
The NFL deadline left no room for traditional discovery cycles. AI compressed the upstream thinking without replacing the judgment on what shipped.
Faster discovery, same craft bar.
