Manchester United fans' Indian connection: An app built by HCL Tech

HCL Technologies signed a deal with Manchester United in 2015, and launched the football club's official app earlier this month. In less than ten days, the app found favourable reviews on both major mobile platforms- it has a 4.8 rating on the Apple Play Store, and 4.7 on Google Play store, with over 1 million installs. Moneycontrol caught up with HCL Technologies’ Corporate Vice President, Ashish Gupta over a call to understand what the project involves and the way forward.

Edited excerpts:

Q: What has the partnership with Manchester United been like so far?

A: When we started this project, ManU, which has a total of about 650 million plus fans globally, had about 150-160 million fans on digital channels like Facebook, Instagram, Google etc.

What was a huge problem was that all these are channels owned by respective platform companies. So they own the data, own the audience. And ManU is just helping that audience to put up stuff. ManU can't do anything with it. In order to be able to act on this data, you need to go to these platforms, buy the data and then use the data for analysis.

At 650 million fans, if all of them can be put up on a digital channel, they would be nearly half of Facebook, and ManU will be able to start monetising it.

In the last three years, we have done several things- we have understood the ManU business. Apart from MUTV, there is merchandising, venue and ticketing there is also community where there are multiple stakeholders.

The challenge was to build something absolutely brilliant and world class and when you launch it in the market it should create a wave.

We continue to see on a month to month basis, more features and more richness coming in (on the app). As people start interacting with it, there is a lot of rich data, which can start to activate potential revenue streams which Manchester United can start monetising.

Q: How does the partnership work for HCL? Did you have to take a different approach from your existing projects?

A: The pressure is a lot because it's very consumer-facing. You have a million people out there trying to find faults. People are passionate (about the sport and club), so they try to find out issues with the app. That also drove the amount of time that we spent understanding the brand, the ManU team is very protective about its brand.

Our US team used to spend time on each and every pixel. I used to be astounded at the amount of time and effort they went through to each and every frame, each and every card. So the designing of this app is like a fashion design gig. That is really where the difference was.

Otherwise, for HCL what does it really mean?  We've created a platform at a level which is flexibility that a customer will need. This is our IP. What we've created is HCL IP. This platform, now available, we can carry it to any of our other customers.

So if I have a customer in retail or CPG who wants to create an experience platform, 70% of what I have created I can carry it to my other customer.

From a technology or delivery perspective, the challenge is not very dissimilar to what we do with any enterprise. The challenge is a lot more to do with the fact that the consumer evaluation is a lot more and a lot stricter.

Testing is very much more- there is almost no other product which has gone through that level of accessibility testing. It has been tested for every type of accessibility requirement.

Q: Is there anything that stood out in designing the experience with ManU's attention to detail?

A: Like I said what stands in my head is the amount of time we spent with the ManU brand teams.

So the most sports apps use real-time stats from this company called Opta. Opta also does what is called a visualisation engine. But because this is ManU, it did not want a standard visualisation. They wanted it to be very contextual to how it wants its fans to see the data.

So we ended up building a complete visualisation engine on top of Opta stats.

So now you will start seeing in real time the data of all players, substitutes and a fan can follow each and every individual in the app and see their performance while a game in on.

In the next maybe month or month and a half, we will be getting features at a different level of user experience. User experience was at a completely different level at what most people design for.

Q: Did you have a lot of football fans working on the project from the HCL side?

A: Absolutely (laughs). The lady who runs the app development for Android and Apple, she said she knew nothing about football when she started, but the one resaon she really enjoyed was her son who is football crazy. So it gave her something to bond with her son about as she picked up stuff on the job.

Its not just people working on the project. It has been a lot of fun, but also very, very tough to be honest. And the product is absolutely world class.

Q: How do you view this partnership in the long term?

A:  I think its a brilliant example of how you can use a strategic partnership to create or impact parallel markets. It is a very effective way for HCL to show what digital transformation can do for the customer.