KFC HEADQUARTERS, Kentucky – Cash-out features are standard at sportsbooks, and players expect it.
This was the feedback our product team received too – the demand for cash out was sky-high.
We wanted to give our users what they wanted, but we didn’t want to just throw out a new feature thoughtlessly. We wanted to stay true to Rivalry’s product philosophy, and that means engineering entertainment and variety into even the finest details.
As you could imagine, those values can take you down a rabbit hole, so we ask ourselves: How can we enhance the experience itself without getting in the way of the user’s end goal?
So we did what any other internationally regulated sports betting company would: we turned our cash-out feature into a chicken drumstick slider. We’re not kidding.
The end result was Chicken Out, a clever take on the cash-out feature that let’s users settle a bet early. Slide the bar further to the right to withdraw more of the wager and subsequently turn an unhatched chicken egg into a crispy, fried drumstick to bail out of the whole bet.
“How do we make it fun?” isn’t the starting point, but something that comes along the way. While building out the early wireframes for the feature, one of the team described cashing out as a user “chickening out” of a bet.
And we just ran with it. The chicken is a visual motif that snuck into our early work and, along with its links to Counter-Strike, become an unofficial symbol for Rivalry itself. Only this time you end up with a literal fried drumstick when you cash out all of your bet.
Building a brand for the internet means adding some extra spice to everything you do – from how you build products to the way you communicate. A big part of that is establishing a culture that promotes personality and creativity, something our Senior Product Designer, David King thinks is critical to what we do at Rivalry:
“No matter how big we get it’s still your designers, product people, and the whole team wanting to show their personality and artwork in the products they make,” King said.
“Rather than homogenizing all the work into a clean simple design system because it's less work, we get to customize our systems, really have fun with it, and create cool features for our users.”
With so many cash-out features looking and feeling the same, taking a silly idea like Chicken Out and putting it in front of millions of users is how you build one of today’s most valuable business assets: brand equity.
If we can deliver value through our brand – right down to the smallest product details like a chicken egg on a slider – it builds the kind of organic, word-of-mouth marketing and viral moments we want.
In today’s competitive landscape, adding value to the player experience every step of the way is how to grow your brand and bottom line. And sometimes that looks like a chicken icon and a deep-fried slider.
