Muhammad Affan Ashraf Portfolio

KEY TERMS

Fantasy Premier League
(FPL)

Fantasy Premier League (FPL)

The official fantasy football game of the English Premier League. Players build a virtual 15-man squad of real footballers and earn points based on those players' real-life match performances.

Manager

A person who plays FPL. Each manager has their own virtual team.

A social platform organized around topic-based communities, where users post and comment about the said topic.

SubReddit

An individual community within Reddit, focused on a single topic. r/FantasyPremierLeague is the subreddit dedicated to FPL.

PROBLEM

FPL research on Reddit costs managers hours they can't afford.

Time is the most valuable thing a person can spend, and Fantasy Premier League takes a lot of it. A survey of 684 active players found 81.7% rely on r/FantasyPL as their primary source, and subreddit activity has grown 12% year-on-year. More managers, more posts, more comments, but no better way to surface what's actually relevant to your squad.

11M+

Active FPL players worldwide

81.7%

Use Reddit as they primary source of research

+12%

Year-on-year growth in subreddit activity

SOLUTION

SubScout: an intelligence layer inside Reddit itself.

A Chrome extension that injects a personalised card directly into r/FantasyPL. It surfaces news for the players in your squad, distills hundreds of comments into a two-sentence consensus, and filters the feed by the criteria managers actually care about, all without pulling them out of the community they value.

LET'S TALK ABOUT THE PROCESS

MAPPING THE CURRENT JOURNEY

Five emotional phases, 1 anxious decision

The journey moves through five phases: Audit, FPL Stats, r/FantasyPL, Paralysis, and Execution. Each phase compounds the friction of the previous one. By the time the manager actually makes their transfer, mild anxiety has escalated to severe anxiety and ended in doubt rather than confidence.

INITIAL HUNCH

Build the smartest possible AI chatbot.

The first prototype was an AI chatbot powered by a large language model with access to the Reddit API and the official FPL data API. Managers could ask "Who should I captain this week?" or "Who should I bench?" and receive a synthesised, personalised recommendation that combined fixture data, player form, and community sentiment.

PRIMARY RESEARCH

Three interviews were enough to tell me the initial hunch was a bad idea.

I ran 45-minute semi-structured interviews with three FPL managers, using the chatbot as a probe. The findings culminated into four insights, and they completely invalidated the chatbot's premise.

Reddit is a social space, not a database

Participants described the subreddit as a "secondary social circle." The chatbot bypassed a huge chunk of that meaningful experience.

Trust is communal, not authoritative

When 200 comments agree on something, that consensus carries weight. A confident chatbot answer couldn't replicate the social proof of seeing the community converge.

Switching cost outweighs AI value

Every participant said the same thing: they did not want another app to manage. Being asked to leave Reddit imposed a cost the chatbot's answers couldn't justify.

Emotional regulation is part of the loop

Managers come to Reddit to share frustration as much as to gather intelligence. A tool that strips out the emotional layer fails to replicate why the community matters.

THE PIVOT

Don't replace the community, improve it.

The constraint was now clear: any solution had to live inside Reddit, not outside it. The mission for v2 was simple. Reduce the time required to extract team-relevant insights from r/FantasyPL, without removing managers from the community they love. Preserve the social rituals. Keep the rant threads. Improve the signal-to-noise ratio.

FINAL PRODUCT

A browser extension that lives on top of your feed

SubScout injects a single, fully interactive card directly into r/FantasyPL. It gives managers everything they need for efficient research: a live Team News carousel, a personalisation panel for filtering the feed, community consensus for each post, and a focus mode that strips visual clutter. It is styled for it to feel like a feature Reddit shipped itself, not an overlay from an external tool.

Team news, in the form of stories

The Team News section automatically scans Reddit for players you actually own. An orange-green gradient means there's an unread post about them, grey means you've already viewed it, and no ring means nothing relevant has surfaced. Click any player and get an instant AI summary of the latest posts and community sentiment, with direct links to the original threads.

Filter that actually map to how managers think

The Personalization panel lets you filter the wall of posts by flairs, specific teams, recency, and engagement level. Hit Save Changes, and your feed reorganizes instantly, surfacing a dedicated 'Your Personalized Feed' section at the top with only the posts relevant to you.

From 200 comments to 2 sentences

SubScout Consensus synthesises hundreds of comments on a post into a concise summary that preserves the key insight while eliminating the noise. The clickable source links are the bridge back to the community. Managers who want to verify can. Managers who don't, won't have to.

Hide the distractions, stay focused

Focus Mode is a single toggle that hides all distractions such as, sidebars, links to other subreddits, and decorative chrome. Posts stay fully accessible. The high-value content is foregrounded; everything else fades.

THE IMPROVED USER JOURNEY

Still five steps, but with the friction stripped out.

With SubScout, all steps of friction are replaced by a faster, more deliberate action.

USABILITY TESTING

Faster on every task, preferred by every participant

I ran a task-based comparative study with nine regular Reddit users via Maze. Each participant completed two timed tasks, once on the standard Reddit interface and once with SubScout active, alongside a post-session debrief. The conditions were counterbalanced to control for learning effects.