Creating Fan Challenges: The Fanatics Loyalty Engine

In 2023, Fanatics had a successful loyalty currency, FanCash, which rewarded users with a percentage of cash back on purchases. While effective at encouraging transactions, FanCash didn’t provide a compelling reason for fans to open the app and engage with the ecosystem every day.

The core business challenge was creating a new engagement layer on top of the existing FanCash system. This new program needed to drive daily habituation, deepen the fan relationship, and be flexible enough to support the entire Fanatics ecosystem, all while adhering to the guiding principles of Simplicity, Value, and Engagement.

This type of problem sits at the core of sports fan engagement, where long-term engagement must balance motivation, simplicity, and repeat value.

I was brought in for a focused, high-impact engagement to provide expert direction on this new initiative. My role was not to lead a long-term design process, but to deliver a moment of clarity: to synthesise the business goals, analyse the market, and provide a clear, actionable vision for a new system that would solve the daily engagement problem.

The process drew heavily from my experience optimisation and idea development frameworks, both focused on aligning business objectives with user behaviour to create sustainable engagement systems.

My analysis of best-in-class digital platforms confirmed that the most effective way to drive daily habits is through consistent, varied, and achievable challenges.

While the existing FanCash system was a strong foundation, simply offering more ways to earn it wouldn’t be enough. My core strategic recommendation was introducing a new, distinct mechanic to sit alongside FanCash: a dedicated challenge-based model. This approach would create a compelling daily “game” for users, giving them a reason to return and participate even when they weren’t making a purchase.

The strategy was translated into a series of key-screen mockups. These were not intended as the final UI, but as a visual framework to communicate the core mechanics, sell the vision to stakeholders, and provide a clear path forward for the internal teams.

The framework was built around a unified system that integrated seamlessly with existing features:

FanChallenges as the Mechanism: Creating a gamified system of daily, weekly, and monthly offerings designed specifically to drive habituation and reward a wide range of user behaviours.

Integrating with FanCash: Leveraging the existing FanCash currency as a primary reward, ensuring the new system felt valuable and deeply integrated with the ecosystem.

FanPass as the Subscription: Designing the framework for a premium, all-access pass that could supercharge the FanChallenges experience.

My visual concepts focused on the key components of the user journey, including the rewards hub, badge collections, and the FanCash balance page, providing a tangible vision for the entire program.

I could have recommended a simple daily challenge system. Instead, I proposed a three-tiered model: Base (Anytime), Silver (Weekly), and Gold (Monthly).


Here’s the psychology: different users engage at different frequencies. Casual fans might only open the app a few times per month. They need achievable, “always available” challenges. Die-hard fans open the app daily. They need premium, time-sensitive challenges that reward their dedication. The three-tier system respects both behaviors and creates a natural progression path from casual to engaged user.

The success of this strategic engagement is measured by its direct influence on the final product direction.

While the final UI and feature set were expertly executed by the talented internal team, the foundational framework I provided demonstrably shaped the core of the program.

It Established the Core Language: The term “FanChallenges,” which I conceptualised, was adopted as the official name for the entire gamified rewards system.

It Defined the Rewards Journey: The model I proposed of tiered challenges (Base, Silver, and Gold) became the central framework for the “Challenge Journey” in the final product strategy.

It Provided the UX for the User Lifecycle: The internal team’s strategic model for the user lifecycle (Attract, Engage, Excite, Retain, Inspire) was a high-level goal. My conceptual designs provided the tangible “how,” showing what the UX at each of those five stages would look and feel like, from the initial welcome screen through the challenge completion and reward redemption flows.

In essence, the engagement delivered a clear, validated, and powerful direction that de-risked the project for Fanatics and accelerated the internal team’s design and development process.

Check out the Fanatics app on the App Store