The problem
AlphaDraft was one of the first two daily fantasy esports platforms and, within nine months of launch, one of the most talked-about startups in the category. FanDuel acquired it in September 2015 to reach an esports audience of 200 million viewers with almost no overlap with traditional sports fans. Players drafted pro gamers instead of athletes and scored fantasy points on their in-match performance, using the same contest formats FanDuel fans already knew: guaranteed prize pools, 50/50s, heads-up.
I worked on AlphaDraft as a front-end developer during its time under FanDuel, building and maintaining the web experience players used to browse contests, draft lineups, and follow live scoring.
Esports contests run on tournament schedules that don't follow a weekly sports calendar, so the front end had to handle irregular contest windows and live updates during multi-day events like the LoL World Championship.
The data itself was the other half of the problem: players, teams, matches, and tournament schedules had to read clearly for fans arriving from FanDuel's traditional sports product.
The constraints
How it evolved
What I did
Another Senior Product Designer led AlphaDraft's overall design. I was asked to step in because of my front-end web experience, and I implemented and maintained the player-facing web UI: contest lobby, lineup drafting, live scoring, and account flows.
Where the front end and the design met, I contributed to interaction and layout decisions. Most of that was about making esports data (players, teams, matches, tournament schedules) readable for fans coming over from FanDuel's traditional sports product.
The outcome
FanDuel closed AlphaDraft on October 21, 2016, at the conclusion of that year's League of Legends World Championship, as the broader daily fantasy industry contracted under legal pressure and fantasy esports failed to reach the scale investors had projected.
AlphaDraft is where the front-end side of my practice was built in production, at a company operating at scale and under regulatory scrutiny. That engineering fluency is what let me later own front-end experience at HypGames, Third Time, and Glu rather than hand designs over a wall. It also planted the idea, carried directly into HypSports two years later, that fantasy sports could be designed for gamers.
What it taught me
- 01Production is the best design education. Building the front end at scale, under regulatory scrutiny, is what made owning design-and-build engagements possible later.
- 02Fantasy sports could be designed for gamers, an idea planted here and carried directly into HypSports two years later.