March Madness Bracket Challenge

Welcome to the Madness! We've created a sleek UX to complete your March Madness bracket directly in Appian; it's FUN, drives collaboration & team building, and socializes Appian within your workforce.

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Inspiration

March Madness is a phenomenon that captures the attention of millions of Americans; a college basketball tournament that spans over 3 weeks, has roughly 70 million brackets submitted trying to pick the winning teams, and accounts for more than $6.3 billion of corporate loss due to productivity drains across America.

Companies see this time of the year as a liability. They block gaming sites and find ways to keep workers from engaging in the madness. Not us! We are presenting the Appian Bracket Challenge application in an effort to socialize the Appian platform within a workforce in a unique, eye-catching, and amazingly fun way. We have transformed the corporate productivity drain into a human capital investment that will keep team morale sky-high while familiarizing your employees with the industry leading digital transformation tool of Appian.

What it does

The March Madness Bracket Challenge application allows users to create brackets, keep track of their wins and losses and how they stack up to the competition. Leveraging an integration with MS Flow, Appian automatically creates new participants based on form entries. From there, users log in to make their picks and complete their bracket from a rich and modern UI. Card layouts and dynamic rich text components provide users an intuitive and eye-catching bracket format.

Using Appian’s web content and document viewer components, users can make educated picks through built-in research capabilities and external interactivity with Sports Illustrated. Participants can even plan a trip to each competing university using a live Google Map integration for driving, flying, or commuting directions.

Throughout the tournament, complex calculations determine current points and potential points (based on game results and relative weight of rounds) for each participant. Interactive and collaborative features, such as “Trash Talk” and result based alerts (Nail Biters and Upsets) engage the bracket community in a fun way.

How we built it

We have built complex logic to display teams, picks, and winners using Appian’s expression rule framework paired with database views, procedures, and functions. Dynamic styling makes it easy to understand which picks you got right and wrong. The bracket has been optimized for region specific viewing, and also for mobile and tablet views, leveraging Appian’s native access configurations to modify the display.

For all competing teams, we have build an alternate design to Appian’s traditional record list view, with a customized checkerboard format to focus on team logos, including fully functioning filters and search capabilities.

We’ve created a centralized data hub for all information around each team, including their school and conference information, recent game results in the tournament, other participants who picked the team to win, and even reactive Google Map API connectivity to plan a trip to the university and embedded team specific sporting news, powered by Sports Illustrated. This one-stop-shop for all related data is key to any Appian implementation, and our Bracket Challenge is no different.

Challenges we ran into

Designing frameworks for the bracket selections (in a performant and scalable manner) proved to be a challenge. Complex logic was needed to identify game participants (based on retrieving previous game selections and results). Additionally, building calculations for Potential Points proved to be more complex than initially thought. Potential Points calculates not only the success of your picks, but also the number and relative weight of remaining win selections. We worked extensively to best design this functionality for efficient calculations across hundreds of brackets (even some of the most well-known bracket challenge gaming sites don’t perform these calculations).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite an easier development path using Appian’s grid layout, we were able to create a more modern and user friendly experience utilizing the newer card layout components. This design decision ended up making our bracket more closely mimic other established challenge sites, and provide a more seamless user experience.

Given the short turnaround time (only 4 days between when teams are announced and when brackets must be completed) and limited marketing efforts, we were able to register nearly 100 participants worldwide. Participants not only signed up to compete, but actually stepped through the process of bracket creation as well, meaning that the user count was specifically active participants.

Finally, we’re proud of the resounding positive feedback we’ve received from challenge participants. Whether from Appian representatives, Ampcus employees, or folks from other companies, users consistently commented about how “cool” this application is and how they never would have expected this possible in a tool like Appian.

What's next for March Madness Bracket Challenge

Moving forward, we hope to leverage the bracket framework to expose the tournament challenge for other sporting events, including the World Cup. Additionally, we hope to expand the user pool and use the tool to socialize the Appian platform more globally. We will enhance the application to stay current with Appian’s new releases and cutting-edge technology to provide participants with an even sleeker UX. Finally, we will look to leverage AI and ML technologies to create a predictive model for game picks, as futile as it may be to try to pick the perfect bracket.

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