How I turned a UPI app's RCB sponsorship into a season-long gamified cricket experience — driving repeat transactions, feature discovery, and daily active users during IPL 2025.
Role
PRODUCT DESIGNER 2 • Research & Product Strategy • UX Design & Reward Mechanics • Visual Direction • Cross-functional Execution
Duration
1 week • MAR'25-Apr'25
+2.4x
Increase in UPI transactions
+32%
Increase in bill payments
+14%
DAU uplift
THE PROBLEM
The #4 UPI app in India — with a rewards awareness gap.
Despite a coins ecosystem that converts directly to cashback, most users were unaware of benefits they could earn on bill payments. The average user transacted in just 1 bill category — limiting engagement and app stickiness.
THE SITuation
Low awareness of cashback rewards across non-recharge categories
Average user transacting in just 1 bill category — fragile retention
Missed high-value transactions in credit card, electricity, insurance
Marketing spend delivering no sustained engagement lift
Underused rewards = wasted value for users and the platform
What We'd Already Tried
Homepage banners promoting zero platform fee on bill payments
Payment success screen nudges to explore other categories
In-app notifications about coins, cashback, and offers
Coins page with exclusive category-specific offers
Still not working.
None of these surfaces drove cross-category behaviour consistently or created lasting habit change.
WHat is the cost of not solving this problem
1
Underused rewards
2
Single-category fragility
3
Missed seasonal moment
An Unexpected Collaboration
Navi UPI × RCB — Official Payments Partner.
On paper, a strong partnership. In practice, significant constraints. No ATL presence, no stumps, no jersey. Our only real asset: a pre-sale window for a handful of match tickets — 14 games, niche audience, short season. Frustrated fans who pre-saved but didn't get tickets made the situation worse.
❌ Limited-time sponsor thinking
Chase eyeballs during the tournament. Push ticket pre-sales. Go quiet after the final.
✅ The question we actually asked
"What if we designed for season-long engagement instead of fleeting eyeballs?"
THE PIVOT
Instead of acting like a limited-time sponsor, we designed Powerplay as a product-powered fan experience baked into the app. Not to sell tickets — but to sell a feeling. Of belonging. Of competition. Of coming back daily.
The Insight
The Rangoli Prophecy.
No time for a formal research sprint. The insight came from lived experience — the Google Pay Rangoli Stamp Bonanza of 2019, where a missing Rangoli stamp sent India into collective obsession. People traded architecture degrees for stamps on Twitter. If that scarcity and collection mechanic could do that, why not design a cricket version?
Low effort, high gratification works best
Automatic rewards on existing behaviour, no extra steps
Users enjoy collection-based challenges
The incomplete set is more motivating than a growing balance
Cricket = universal emotional trigger
New users landed on a product marketing screen — a trust-building went to a waste.
That's exactly what I did. Designed an IPL × UPI gamification layer purely on that instinct — and it became the most engaging campaign of the year.
My Role & Team
What I owned — and who I worked with.
Research & Product Strategy
Defined the entire campaign framework
UX Design & Reward Mechanics
Designed frictionless reward flows
Visual Direction
Set the visual & animation language
Cross-functional Execution
Aligned product, dev & marketing
The Concept
Score Big With Every Pay.
A game layer built on top of daily UPI usage. Every transaction triggers a scratch card to reveal a random RCB player. Collect all 11 unique players and win ₹1,000 + signed RCB merchandise. The game runs automatically — whether you're paying a mobile bill or a credit card.
Design Process
Three decisions that shaped everything.
Decision 1
Seamless over spectacular
The temptation was a dedicated game hub — a separate section users would visit intentionally. We pushed back hard. A separate destination requires motivation to open it. We needed zero additional motivation. The reward had to live inside the payment flow itself, where attention already was.
Decision 2
Collectibles over cashback multipliers
We explored a straightforward rewards multiplier first — pay more, earn more coins. It tested flat. The Rangoli insight told us that collection-based challenges create a fundamentally different psychological pull. The incompleteness of a partial squad is more motivating than a balance growing slowly in the background.
Decision 3
Built to outlive the season
Most campaign designs are throwaway — bespoke assets, hardcoded logic, rebuilt from scratch each time. With a 1-week delivery window and future seasonal plans, this had to be different. I designed the underlying system as a reusable modular framework from day one.
DECISION
Modular campaign system — swap the theme (IPL → Diwali → New Year), swap the collectible type, keep the mechanics and component architecture. Engineers build once. Designers reskin. The framework was reused across 4+ campaigns post-launch.
Key Design Decisions
The choices that made it feel like IPL
Decision 01
Motion as the reward signal
Decision 02
The pitch as the collection UI
Decision 03
Microcopy as the game mechanic
Decision 04
Visual language borrowed from the sport
Built for IPL. Designed for everything after.
The campaign was scoped tightly for IPL 2025 — but the underlying framework was always designed to outlive the season and power the organisation's always-on growth ambitions.
Scratch card mechanic on payment success screen
Coins per unique player type — category diversity incentive
RCB player card collectibles — 11 unique players
Mega reward for completing full squad (₹1,000 + merchandise)
Cricket pitch UI for squad progress
tracking
Modular campaign design system + reusable UI vault
Future — Campaign Framework
→ Festive reskin — Diwali sticker collectibles
→ New Year edition — countdown reward mechanic
→ Product launch gamification — feature discovery loops
→ Social sharing and friend-invite leaderboards
→ Always-on engagement engine beyond seasonal events
TESTIMONIALs
Reflection
What I learned
The constraint was the brief.
No ATL presence, limited SKU, 1-week window — these weren't obstacles, they were the design prompt. The constraint of not being able to push tickets forced a better question: what experience could we build that would outlast the tournament?
Emotion beats incentive.
We didn't win because we offered the best cashback. We won because collecting an RCB player card after paying a bill made users feel like fans, not customers. The cricket emotion did the heavy lifting — our job was to not get in its way.
Design for reuse from day one.
The modular system decision paid dividends immediately. Four campaigns later, the team was shipping in days, not weeks. If I could go back, I'd push even harder on the component documentation to make handoffs between design and engineering smoother.
One week is enough — if the problem is clear.
The speed was only possible because the design question was well-defined before any screen was drawn. Concept to dev-ready in 7 days with a 12-person engineering team aligned — that's a process outcome, not a heroic one.