KingMakers
KingMakers is a sports and digital entertainment platform operating across African markets.
As a Senior Product Designer, my goal is to increase users' confidence and control while helping them discover relevant content, grounded in discovery research, behavioral analytics, and experimentation.
Reducing friction in cognitive heavy journeys
At KingMakers, I work within the Sportsbook vertical on one core objective: make journeys clearer and more resilient without limiting user autonomy.
The core journey requires users to make multiple decisions before committing. The more actions, the more revenue, but the process is also cognitively demanding. This gets harder when most users operate on low-bandwidth networks and entry-level Android devices. Friction isn't isolated to one screen, it compounds across the entire journey.
The system allows exploration but makes commitment easy to postpone. That's why friction exists at multiple points: users browse extensively but delay their first action, drop-off is high after the first action, navigation patterns increase cognitive load, network instability causes state loss, and social sharing happens outside the product.
Rather than shipping features in isolation, the work focuses on three leverage areas.
Guided entry - lowering initiation friction
The problem
Users were browsing extensively but delaying their first action. Starting required navigating across competitions, opening individual events, validating information, and manually assembling combinations. Each step added cognitive load, made worse by slow network conditions.
On top of that, Nigerian users frequently shared selections socially, but the product had no structured entry point for this behavior. The system enabled exploration but did nothing to reduce the effort of getting started.
What we shipped
We introduced a structured entry point with pre-assembled combinations, reducing the number of steps before a first action and integrating seamless sharing.
Impact
Double-digit increase in first-selection rate and multi-selection starts. Users entering through the new entry point also showed higher average selections per session and a meaningful uplift in completed actions. No negative impact on organic journey conversion
Decision support through information - reducing cognitive load
The problem
Users did not lack options, they lacked decision confidence. Statistical information existed but was fragmented across event pages and secondary tabs. Validating a choice meant jumping between multiple screens, adding navigation fatigue to an already high-choice environment.
The challenge was not adding more insights but structuring them to reduce cognitive overhead and support faster commitment.
What we shipped
We embedded contextual statistical insights directly within the browsing experience, so users could validate decisions without leaving the page.
Impact
Double-digit increase in first-selection rate among users exposed to contextual insights, with higher average selections per session and a measurable reduction in time to first action. No increase in page load time despite the added data layer.
Multi-Select Optimization - reducing expansion and completion friction
The problem
Users could only access one competition at a time. To explore matches across leagues, they had to repeatedly navigate back and forth between competition lists and fixture pages. On low-bandwidth networks, each transition introduced loading delays, increasing navigation fatigue and making exploration mechanically expensive.
What we shipped
We enabled users to browse multiple competitions simultaneously, removing the need for constant back-navigation. We also simplified how selections accumulate and improved state persistence during network drops, so users wouldn't lose progress mid-journey.
Impact
Meaningful increase in multi-selection depth, faster progression from first to second selection, and reduction in abandonment during cross-competition exploration.
Deep dive
Want to go deeper into the problem framing, hypotheses, experimentation, and results? Happy to walk through any of these in a call.
Get to know me
I build digital products. Not just the interface. The thinking behind why it works, who it is for, and whether it is actually solving the right problem.