Arsenal
Founded in 1886, Arsenal are one of the most successful English football clubs with one of the largest fanbases in the world and the club is valued at more than £1.3 billion.
We were approached by Arsenal to redesign and redevelop their successful iPhone app and also to create an iPad and Android experience to match the iPhone version, improving the experience across all devices.
The Challenge
The app had not been updated in several years and although was useful to fans, it was showing its age and not taking advantage of some of the newer features included in the latest version of iOS. The challenge was to boost fan engagement by improving the experience across all of the devices, making it consistent between iOS and Android and keeping the brand experience consistent between the existing website and the new apps.
Our Solution
The brief was to design a new app that worked beautifully and consistently across different platforms and screen sizes and in-line with the styling that had been developed for the website. The key was to build the new app to be flexible and expandable so that it could develop over time, building on a strong and secure base and avoiding the need for wholesale redesign again. Instead, the app should evolve in design and functionality as new technologies all.
Being honoured by the International Webby Awards is testament to the job this app is doing for fan engagement for the club.
We developed a new way of presenting and navigating the content based on the needs of the fans, with a scrollable dashboard view giving fans the information that they want in the fastest possible way.
The app is intuitive to use. Design and branding are consistent the club’s guidelines while also being appropriate to the device, with legibility and ease of use at the forefront of the experience.
Fans can personalise their matchday experience through the customisation of notifications, e.g. choosing if they want alerts around match kick-off, goals, red cards and more, for each match.
The new preference centre allows fans to mute matches if they do not want to know the score.
Alerts also include news stories, giving Arsenal fans the breaking stories at their finger tips when the news happens.
Our experience of integrating complex data feeds came to the fore as Arsenal wanted to ensure the data on the app and the website is consistent and as up-to-date as possible.
Audio and video are increasingly important to sports apps and we have integrated these seamlessly into the user experience.
- Loads and works faster
- Improved design and graphics
- New and improved navigation and content filtering
- Alerts built in to the iOS 8 Notification centre
- Optimized for iPad and iPhone
- Embedded audio and video feed
- Live audio that can be played in background of other apps
- Live match reports
- Easy accessible dashboard
The Result
Reaction to the new app has been fantastic with fans seeing the improved speed and design of the app as important factors. The app has gained 4.5 stars in the both Apple and Android app stores and its continued development has already seen key improvements to address fans’ feedback.
In the spring of 2017, Arsenal announced that the app was honoured for Best Mobile Sites and Apps – Sports category in the 21st Annual Webby Awards
"It has been a pleasure to work with Other Media on the next generation of our apps. From the off they showed a great understanding of our requirements and have been responsive and flexible during the whole process. We’re very much looking forward to what we can do in this space next."
