Spicy Mango launches Gameday Widget Studio to accelerate digital fan experience creation

New drag-and-drop tooling enables product and editorial teams to build, customise and publish data-rich sports experiences directly from Gameday - reducing the traditional dependency on front-end development.

Spicy Mango has launched Gameday Widget Studio, a new capability that makes it faster and easier for sports organisations to turn their data and content into engaging digital fan experiences.

From live scoreboards and ranking tables to head-to-head comparisons, key moment timelines and wider match centre components, Widget Studio provides an intuitive visual environment for creating sports data experiences without requiring every new idea to become a front-end development project.

The result is a much shorter route from data to experience.

Moving sports experience creation closer to the product team

Creating even relatively familiar sports components can require significant coordination between product, design and engineering teams.

The data needs to be identified and integrated. Components must be developed. Styling needs to be applied. Experiences must be tested, deployed and maintained.

Widget Studio changes that workflow.

Using an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, product and editorial teams can create, configure and rapidly prototype fan-facing components themselves. Extensive styling controls allow experiences to be adapted to individual brands and digital products, while reusable components provide a faster starting point for common sports use cases.

This enables technical teams to concentrate on the areas where their expertise creates the greatest value, while product and editorial teams gain greater freedom to experiment, iterate and respond to new ideas.

Built around the data already in Gameday

What makes Widget Studio particularly powerful is its native connection to Gameday.

Gameday is Spicy Mango's sports data management, enrichment and fan engagement platform, providing organisations with a structured environment for consolidating, managing and enriching sports data and content.

Widget Studio brings that data closer to the presentation layer.

Rather than building an experience first and then solving how it connects to the underlying sports data, teams can work directly with information already available through Gameday. Scores, standings, competitors, events, key moments and enriched content can become the building blocks for new fan experiences.

It creates a connected workflow from data management and enrichment through to visualisation and activation.

Prototype quickly. Publish simply.

Widget Studio has been designed to support both rapid experimentation and straightforward integration into existing digital products.

Teams can rapidly create, configure and refine new fan experiences, moving from concept to publication without the heavy front-end development traditionally required.

Widgets can be incorporated into websites and other digital experiences using hosted iframes or JavaScript elements, providing a lightweight route to publication without requiring organisations to deploy and operate a separate widget application.

Delivered as SaaS tooling, Widget Studio also removes another layer of infrastructure from the process.

More freedom to build around the fan

The launch of Widget Studio represents a further expansion of Gameday's fan engagement capabilities.

By reducing the technical overhead involved in creating data-driven front-end experiences, Spicy Mango is enabling sports organisations to experiment more freely with how their data is presented and how fans interact with it.

A match centre no longer needs to be treated as one large, infrequently changing development project. Individual components can be created, tested and evolved around different competitions, events, editorial propositions and audience needs.

That creates opportunities for organisations to move faster, make greater use of the sports data and content they already manage, and continually develop the digital experiences they offer their fans.

Built on the Gameday foundation

Widget Studio is backed by the same Gameday technology that manages and delivers structured sports data into digital products and fan experiences.

That combination brings together an intuitive experience-creation layer with the performance, structure and robustness required to support live sports data.

The result is a simpler way to move from sports data to compelling digital experiences, without making every new fan engagement idea an engineering project.

Chris Wood, Chief Technology Officer, Spicy Mango

“Sports organisations have no shortage of ideas for improving their digital fan experiences. The constraint is often how quickly those ideas can move from concept into a live product because of the dependency on design and engineering resources.

“Widget Studio removes much of the repetitive development work from that process. By connecting intuitive experience creation directly to Gameday, we can give product and editorial teams much greater freedom to experiment with their data, and build front end components that are simple to connect to back-end data.

“It brings the presentation layer much closer to the data and content already being managed in Gameday - and creates a significantly faster path from an idea to something a fan can actually interact with.”

Discover Gameday Widget Studio

Find out how Gameday Widget Studio can help your teams create and launch richer sports data experiences with less development overhead.