Making matchdays feel live

Live Points and Live Substitutions helped extend Comunio from a product primarily used before the matchday into an experience that also accompanied users while football was actually happening.

The goal was to bring live performance, expected points and matchday decisions closer to the user, making the game feel more immediate, engaging and useful throughout the weekend.

Company: Comunio
Role: Product Designer
Product: Fantasy Football Platform
Timeline: 2018 – 2024

The problem

Comunio was traditionally strongest before the matchday: checking the transfer market, preparing the lineup and managing the squad.

Once matches started, however, users had a different need: they wanted to know how their real-world players were performing and what that meant for their fantasy team.

Before Live Points, many users relied on third-party websites to check player statistics, estimate the points each player might receive, and then manually calculate the expected total for their lineup.

The information existed, but the experience was fragmented and unnecessarily laborious.

Bringing matchday back into Comunio

Live Points turned Comunio into a single source of truth during the matchday.

Users could follow performance and expected points directly inside the product, both:

•at team level, with the combined score of their lineup
•at player level, understanding how each individual player contributed

This removed the need to jump between external sources and manually calculate expected results.

More importantly, it brought an important part of the fantasy football experience back into Comunio itself.

Designing for matchday behaviour

Usage changed significantly once matches kicked off.

Live Points and standings became much more relevant, turning Comunio into a second-screen experience while users watched football.

These patterns differed across Germany, Spain and Turkey because matches were distributed differently across the weekend, creating different traffic peaks in each market.

Those peaks mattered both for engagement and for a business model that benefited from users returning repeatedly during the matchday.

Bringing the game closer to the user

Live Points gave users immediate feedback on how real-world football affected their fantasy team.

Instead of preparing a lineup and waiting for the final result, users could follow their team as the action unfolded.

This made Comunio feel closer to the live football experience and gave users another reason to return throughout the weekend.

Extending the experience

We later extended this idea with Live Substitutions.

Users were no longer only following their fantasy performance in real time — they could still make decisions while the matchday was ongoing.

Together, Live Points and Live Substitutions transformed matchday from a largely passive period into an active part of the game.

Designing for real-time engagement

The experience needed to work especially well on mobile, where users frequently checked Comunio while watching matches or moving between contexts.

Information had to remain immediate and easy to scan despite the amount of live data involved:

•total team points
•individual player performance
•current standings
•matchday decisions

The challenge was to surface more real-time information without making an already data-heavy football product feel overwhelming.

What changed

Comunio became relevant across more of the football journey.

Users could prepare before the matchday, follow their players and team while matches were happening, and later use Live Substitutions to continue making meaningful decisions during the action.

At the same time, a behaviour that previously sent users to third-party services was brought back into Comunio through a faster and more complete experience.

Want to learn more?

There's more behind the matchday behaviours, real-time interactions and product decisions that shaped these features.

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