Project Betfusion: Expert Picks Experience

CBS Sports had the audience. SportsLine had the expertise. The app kept them apart.

BetFusion explored how to bring SportsLine’s premium projections and expert picks into the CBS Sports App, so fans could research, follow and act on betting insights in one place. CBS Sports already reached a large, engaged sports audience, and SportsLine offered the expert analysis and simulation models that serious bettors subscribe for, yet the experience held them apart. My role was to design that connection: introduce expert picks where engaged users already were, and give a paid premium product the structure and visibility it needed to earn its place.

CBS Sports drew a large audience of bettors and interested fans, and many SportsLine subscribers already leaned on CBS Sports for their betting insights. But the premium expertise lived apart from where fans actually researched games. The Picks tab, where betting content was meant to sit, was underused and cluttered, and the people who did open it tended to move straight past the insights to other features. It was not meeting users’ needs.

The real problem. Expert Picks, a paid premium product, sat inside an already cluttered tab alongside free content, with no clear structure to help it stand out or explain what was premium and why. Newer bettors met terminology and detail they did not understand, and the paywall itself was not clearly communicated. The opportunity was to introduce the premium expertise where engaged bettors already were, in the flow of researching a game, and to give it the clarity, hierarchy and visibility to earn a subscription rather than be lost in the noise.

The problem and approach are open above. The full work stays private: the audience and segmentation research, competitive analysis, content strategy and sitemap, the heuristic evaluation, designs and prototype, plus the slide deck. Available with an access code. Happy to share with recruiters and teams.