Vota

Live match voting for football fans

Vota wants football fans, not a single owner, to vote on the decisions that run their club. CodeLeap ran the product design — a briefing to set direction, the app's screens and flows in Figma, and a round of user testing to sharpen them.

What we did CodeLeap designed the full fan experience and delivered it as an interactive prototype, covering the timed voting windows that open during a match, the player and tactic choices fans vote on, and the FanXP points and leaderboards that turn a correct call into standing among other fans. It gave the founder something real enough to validate the concept and present to funders without committing to a build first.

Let the fans decide.

Vota is a mobile app that lets football fans vote on the decisions a manager faces while the match is actually being played, including substitutions, formation, formation roles and tactics. Fans do not stake money; they earn points, called FanXP, when they call what the team actually goes on to do, and those points place them on leaderboards against other fans. The founder came to CodeLeap to turn the concept into a designed, interactive product, so he could validate the idea and demonstrate it to the funding partners backing the app.

Product features

Live voting sessions

Voting opens in timed windows during the match, set by the match operator with a start time and a duration as short as ninety seconds. Sessions are presented one at a time in order when several are queued, because a fan watching a live game has no attention to spare for deciding which poll to answer first.
Voting on real match decisions

Fans vote on tactics and formation from fixed options, and on substitutions and formation roles by choosing actual players, selecting who comes off and who comes on, or which player should fill a given role. Designing a player-selection interaction that can be completed in seconds was the harder half of the work, since it carries far more information than a simple poll.
Results and voting stats

When a voting window closes, fans see how the vote broke down, with the percentage behind each option and, for role-based votes, the winning player and the share that chose them. Showing the split is what makes the feature social, because a fan wants to know whether the crowd agreed with them.
FanXP points and leaderboards

Correct calls earn FanXP, which feeds an all-time leaderboard and a separate leaderboard for each match, with the fan's own position surfaced at the top of both. Fans can move between matches to see how they placed, which gives the app a reason to open outside of match day.
Match-day notifications

Fans are notified when a voting session opens, and tapping the notification takes them straight to the voting screen. With a window of ninety seconds, a notification that lands a step away from the vote is a notification that arrives too late.
Light and dark themes

The interface was designed in full across both light and dark, with consistent styling between them. Designing both properly rather than deriving one from the other doubles the design surface, and it matters for an app people open in a stadium or on a sofa at night.

Challenge

The constraint that shapes everything here is the ninety-second window. A fan is watching a live match, their attention is on the pitch, and the app has to present a decision, take an answer and confirm it in the time before play moves on. That rules out anything layered or exploratory, and it puts the whole weight of the design on how quickly a screen can be read and acted on.

The content of the votes made that harder. Choosing a formation is a simple selection, but choosing which player comes off and which comes on, or assigning a player to a formation role, means presenting a squad and taking two related answers in the same short window. The prototype also had a job beyond design: the founder needed to validate the concept with fans and present it to funding partners, so it had to feel like a finished product rather than a set of screens.

Solution

CodeLeap designed the fan-facing experience end to end and delivered it as an interactive Figma prototype covering the full journey, from a voting session opening during a match through to the leaderboard a fan lands on afterwards. The design was developed iteratively across several rounds of feedback with the founder, with every screen resolved to a standard a development team can build directly from.

The prototype achieved what the founder needed. It validated the concept and gave him something concrete to demonstrate to the app's funding partners, and the app is expected to move into development in the coming year. CodeLeap's involvement to date has been the UX design and prototype rather than the build.

Tech stack

The project was delivered as a design and prototyping engagement.

Design: Figma — full UI screen set across light and dark themes, and an interactive prototype of the complete fan journey
Scope: UX design and prototype only; the full build was quoted separately and has not yet been undertaken