Baby Bookie
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Challenge
Bring the spectator angle to following along a family member or friend’s pregnancy.
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Solution
Create a fun, accessible, online version of everyone’s favorite baby shower game.
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Results
A responsive site where over 597,000 bets have been made. Expecting a baby? Know a friend who is? Think you can predict the day and time Snooki will have hers? Baby Bookie is for you.
Place your bets, baby. Here at Viget, we love babies. Company-wide, we have over 45 Vige-babies (and counting!) We also love competition. We’ve all used emails or sticky notes on large posterboards to guess arrival date and birth weights, because there just wasn’t a good way to play the classic baby pool guessing game online. For one of our Pointless Corp Weekends, the HQ team wanted to find a way for family, friends, and the whole dang Internet to have some fun guessing a baby's arrival date. Because what’s better than being pregnant? Being right.
Areas of Expertise
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Baby Steps
The initial version of Baby Bookie was built and launched in a weekend. But we stuck with Baby Bookie even after Pointless Weekend, making incremental changes over time to introduce new features and branding as our user base grew.
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Design a Mother Can Love
We found over time that mothers and their friends were our primary audience, rather than fathers or people who just like to bet, so we updated the branding to a softer, more contemporary look.
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Planning for Real Life
When looking at user behavior, we found that many pools were abandoned. In addition to some simple UI changes, we created a "Pool Godparents" feature where users can assign a "back-up" admin to assist in managing the pool. This is particularly helpful for busy new parents who have a grandmother, best friend or uncle to help out in completing the pool and crowning a pool winner.
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Spreading the News
All too often nowadays we see informal birth announcements via Facebook and Twitter. We thought to provide our users with an announcement page, a quick way to announce the birth with a simple, elegant, and sharable design.
Reborn: The New Baby Bookie!Ben Eckerson, Former Senior Digital Strategist
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Summary
Our combined love of babies and competition fueled our motivation on this passion project. We built Baby Bookie to be easy and fun and with features we as parents, aunts, uncles, and friends wanted to see. We clearly hit a nerve – our community has grown to over 80,000 baby-guessing users.
