Building around the moments that define a fantasy season
For fantasy sports players, the season has a few moments that matter more than others. Friends organize leagues, prepare for a live draft, manage rosters and follow results week after week. When tournament brackets enter the picture, the experience also needs to handle picks, deadlines and competition over a much shorter schedule.
FantasyBoss was developing a product for those experiences. The founder already had an app and an extensive set of design files, but the older Flutter implementation no longer matched the intended user flows or the visual designs. The team needed to establish how the product should work before committing to the next mobile build.
SLIDEFACTORY joined in late 2023 as the design and development team. We mapped the main flows, brought the screen designs into a consistent system and rebuilt the mobile experience in React Native, including a live draft room and league tools. The football app entered beta for the 2024 season, and a separate March Madness bracket game was released for the 2025 tournament.
Starting with the flow
The founder had many screens, but the files alone didn’t describe what happened when a user registered, joined a league, adjusted draft settings or entered a season. We mapped those journeys first, including the draft and the ongoing team-management experience, then compared the proposed flows with the older Flutter app.
That analysis informed the decision to rebuild the mobile application in React Native rather than continue extending the earlier implementation. The journey maps became the basis for the development backlog and ongoing sprint reviews in Jira.
Giving the screens a shared design language
As development proceeded, we translated the older Adobe XD designs into Figma and organized the screens around one documented typography and visual system. The work covered more than 40 screens and included the landing and onboarding experience, registration, login and the first screen users see after entering the app.
New designs were needed for My Team, league standings, draft summaries, a watchlist, invitation paths and trades, including offers, the trade block and responses to proposals. We also updated the product map in Miro so the founder, designers and developers worked from the same flow. When the project expanded into a March Madness experience, we designed the bracket states, round-by-round pick screens, account recovery and required legal pages within that broader system.
Making draft night work in real time
We implemented the new app in React Native with Redux and reusable themed components. The central experience was the live draft room. Players needed to see whose pick was next, the clock, their roster positions and the available player list at the same time, while every participant’s phone reflected the same changes. The draft logic handled snake order, position restrictions and an automatic pick when a participant missed a turn.
Beyond draft night, the app needed to carry the league through a season. We built league and draft settings, commissioner tools, roster and position limits, tie-break rules, buy-ins and payouts, and invitations using adaptable form components. Team management covered adding and dropping players, a watchlist, standings and weekly matchups with scoring from a sports data feed. Registration, verification, password resets and a paid league-entry flow completed the core account work.
Throughout development, the founder received TestFlight and Android test builds to evaluate the screens and functions on real devices.
A March Madness bracket game in one season
The founder later wanted a product for the college basketball tournament. From autumn 2024 into March 2025, we designed and developed a separate bracket challenge with a perfect-bracket mode and a round-by-round mode. It included branded league pages for partner organizations, a women’s tournament league alongside the men’s and screens that reflected when picks and rounds were locked.
That bracket app was submitted and released for iOS and Android in March 2025, ahead of the tournament. The fantasy football app had previously entered beta testing for the 2024 season.
From football beta to a March tournament release
FantasyBoss began this phase with a product concept, a large collection of designs and an older mobile implementation. The engagement turned those materials into clearer user flows, a shared design system covering more than 40 screens and a React Native app with a live draft room and league-management experience. The football product entered beta for the 2024 season.
The next milestone came in March 2025, when the separate March Madness bracket app was released on the App Store and Google Play ahead of the tournament. Across the November 2023 to May 2025 engagement, we worked with the founder from product design through mobile implementation and release. The two milestones reflect the same approach: designing the moments that mattered to players and developing the interactions needed to support them.
