A football-themed mobile game for Spurs fans

Getir is a pioneer in ultra-fast grocery delivery. Customers order through its app and deliveries can arrive as fast as 10 to 40 minutes. It operates in 48 cities across the UK, US and Europe and 81 in Turkey. After a funding round in 2022 it’s valued at $12bn. 

Among their global partnerships, in summer 2021 Getir became the official training wear partner of Tottenham Hotspur FC. CAA approached us to help deliver an exciting digital product to celebrate this milestone partnership. The brief was to run an online competition in the stadium, to build brand awareness, engagement and incentivise people to download the Getir app. 

What we did

Getir wanted an engaging football-themed experience giving fans the chance to win a selection of prizes including stadium tours, signed shirts, £10 Getir credit and more. The experience had to be fast – around 15 seconds.

We had to consider several elements of functionality:

• The mechanic to select randomised winners

• The mechanic of the game

• The journey time from the game to the Getir app and back again

• User verification in the app and a smooth API call from our product to Getir’s database

Gamification

The prizes within the product would be randomised and users wouldn’t have an impact on the outcome, but we nevertheless wanted to create a sense of gamification. Making a tool into a game appeals to people’s natural desires for learning, mastery, achievement, play or competitiveness. By creating a sense of gamification our designers could insert gameplay elements into a non-gaming setting, with fun features to satisfy people’s natural motivations so that they would enjoy the experience more.

As the use-time of the game was so short, we had to create a simple mechanic that people would instinctively know how to interact with, and with the capacity to present multiple prizes to build suspense and intrigue. This dictated the final decisions on the design.

Design and UI

Getir’s branding led the look and feel of the product, using their fonts and colour palette. This was a unique product for the company, so we had to build a number of new elements. The brand is illustration-based with bright colours, so everything else within the product had to align with that. For example, we couldn’t use photo-realistic elements or animated vectors. We had to find a balance between brand consistency and bringing personality and life to the experience.

We did this in a few ways. We designed a goalie wearing the official home game kit in the same style as Getir’s distinctive scooter rider. We created a stadium crowd illustration with photography flashes and movement to suggest the buzz of a real crowd. We built a football that reflected the brand but with the depth of 3D to give a sense of realism. These felt engaging while still in line with Getir’s visual style. 

This design also fed into an animated video that played behind the game mechanic. 

When users won a prize, the game had to feel exciting and dynamic so we built in flashing colours and confetti for every prize. As this was a firmly mobile-first experience, we rigorously tested the design across multiple devices so that it would perform perfectly every time. 

Digital development

As the product was going to be used in the Spurs stadium, which has a capacity of 62,000, it couldn’t crash if thousands of people used it at once. We utilised Getir’s existing servers and app verification flow. We ensured that the servers would be able to handle the traffic and conducted a series of tests including load testing.

We created the information flow from the product to the servers using a custom-built API. When users at the stadium scan the QR code to open the experience, information is pulled from the Getir server to define which prizes are available for that event and the dynamic prize images that the user sees on screen.

The game asks for phone verification and, to prevent multiple entries, looks up the user in the Getir database or adds them to it if they’re new. As long as they haven’t previously entered that week’s competition, they’re texted a unique ID code to enter the app and continue with the game. 

Outcome

We built a unique digital product that pays homage to the great game while also building awareness of Getir among football fans and increasing downloads of its app. The product was launched in the stadium for a home game between Spurs and Manchester United and many prizes were awarded.