oddschecker needed an app in time for NFL season – in three months. With such a limited time frame available, who could take an app through design, build and testing in only 90 days? We can.

 

Much like you’d use comparison sites to check for the best deals on your car insurance, oddschecker is on a mission to provide the same service for betting. Chances are, if you’re putting down some money on your favourite horse in the Grand National, you’ll want the best odds you can get for your money. oddschecker can help.

oddschecker had previously tried to launch an app in-house to conquer America, but it was far more challenging than anticipated and largely unsuccessful despite its best efforts. To prove a professional agency that specialises in app development could build it faster, better and more efficiently, it asked UIC Digital to be its test case. The catch? It needed an MVP ready for NFL season, in just three months. That’s design, build and testing from scratch in just 90 days – what are the odds?

Going all in

To start, we hosted a packed workshop with stakeholders in person and joining virtually, to really get under the skin of the brief. Using this as a discovery session, we sought to galvanise the team and generate a really thorough brief that had a vision statement in the middle of it.

That vision was to be the very first port of call for anyone looking to place a bet, providing the best odds from a range of different betting companies. To ‘take it back to the best comparison experience we can offer’. Using this as our north star, we began to design and prototype the site’s architecture as our development team pulled together the right path criteria to match a squeezed timeframe – even adjusting to one-week sprints to improve efficiency.

The best and, frankly, only way to deliver a project of this scale in such a short time is tight-knit collaboration. We pooled resources and sought to make the whole team – client or agency – feel as one. We did this using honesty and transparency, taking everyone along for the ride at every step – showing mock-ups only 60% complete, creating product demos with limited APIs, adding functionality to a bare framework with only weeks until our go live date. As fast as humanly possible. As a result, stakeholders at oddschecker talked freely, made themselves available for last-minute meetings and workshops and embraced difficult conversations with community spirit. It led to one of the most organic and natural collaborations we’ve ever experienced.

The odds-on favourite

To build the app, we started with our discovery session and, from there, opened up parallel work streams to create early prototypes, wireframes aligned to audiences, user research interviews and designs based on brand guidelines. In tandem, with some of this established, our development team created user stories in JIRA, and used a loose scrum-kanban hybrid to work to weekly sprint cycles and rapid iterations. We released early, and released often.

That meant almost daily builds, distributed using TestFlight so all stakeholders could test and feedback. All-in-all, we tested 35 builds. We created a completely new frontend from scratch, middleware for API configurations and a matching backend. We launched the app to just a few dozen test users for live feedback, and quickly iterated based on this with a 1.1 release that included new functionalities. The final public release landed at build 73.

To make this happen, not only did we need to make the short time frame work, we also had to recruit an extension to our development team at lightning pace too. We worked with an open scope, with plenty of ideas and functionalities to consider, whilst also bearing in mind the app would grow from one sport to a huge array in multiple languages – so needed to be future-proofed. An oddschecker rebrand threatened to throw the project at odds with our timeline, but our token-based design approach meant we were able to manage the transition smoothly. And, of course, it had to pass Apple’s rigorous security and screening process.

 

Double or nothing

The app is now in the throes of Apple’s location and legal processes for gambling apps, which can take some time. However, we did indeed successfully complete a brand new app in three months flat, leading to being kept on with oddschecker for version 2.0.

What were the odds? Very good, as it happens.