Merry Christmas from the team here at Pickwatch.

Despite it being closer to the end of the regular season than the beginning, we're continuing to release new features and improvements based on your feedback. Here are two more just in time for the festive period:

New expert and user profiles

As you can see, our profiles have been upgraded to be more informative and flexible.

Our old profiles were very colorful, but often difficult to read or find what you needed. More importantly, with multiple ways to slice our data, we wanted to be clearer in a profile about whether someone was good or bad, rather than just viewing them in isolation.

That means we've added a new chart to all profiles, in which you can see how someone performs against the average of all experts - or if you're viewing a fan, the average of all users! You can change the timeframe of the chart to look at lifetime records, or just look at the last three weeks. The buttons to the left of the chart allow you to show wins, ranking, or profit, depending on which matters most to you.

Another new section is the information panel to the left of profiles, giving you information on when experts make picks most often, how often they have been known to change picks, and any known allegiances that they have (for example, former players and the teams they played for, or journalists who cover teams).

As always, you can see which teams each experts pick the best, and we've added a toggle to profiles that will roll out across the site next year, the ability to work in either dollars or units. Units are a traditional gambling confidence measurement of 1-5, so if you stake 5 units, you're very confident, if you stake 1, you're not. This means whether your bankroll is $100 or $1,000, you can understand a 5 unit pick and a 1 unit pick.

We've made viewing weekly records and pick history more informative and easy to read, and you can also see the outcome and odds of every pick.

Profiles are really great for you to see your own strengths and weaknesses, and there are infinite things we can add to them, but if there are things you'd like to see, we're happy to consider them in our roadmap. Get in touch to let us know your suggestions and feedback.

Alongside user profiles, a smaller but perhaps more important change is the ability to now find yourself in tables.

We know the pain of knowing our ranking, but not knowing which page we're on, or who we need to beat to move forward. I tasked our team with solving this problem a few weeks ago, and they've delivered a great solution that fits the bill.

If you click the 'find me' button, the table will quickly reload to show your current position and the people around you. That means if you're 5,000th, there's no more trying to get to page 100 to see yourself, it's one click. As always, we're trying to make these small interactions much easier.

We do have another plan for this feature that will roll out after our team return from a well-earned Christmas break. At the moment, you'll need to turn on fan picks in the table to find yourself, but we'll be adding the capability to see yourself compared to the experts in a small update in the new year.

That will mean that for the first time, you can see not only where you rank against fans, but against the people who get paid to make their picks. I think that's pretty cool, and all of this is free to all users, whether they're members or not, although you'll be limited as to what you can see if you're not a Pickwatch member.

Future updates

We're heading into the new year with a spring in our step. With tens of thousands of you now official paid members, it gives us a better understanding of what we need to focus on. All of these small touches - and the many that don't get a development blog! - add up to a much better experience now, than 12 months ago.

So as we head into 2024, we have a ton of new things coming. On our immediate horizon right now are:

Game hubs for all sports (eg: head to head stats, lineups, injuries)
Game recaps and box scores for all sports (post-game stats)
Update private leagues and add all sports, with more options and a better interface
Make private leagues accessible from the app!
Improvements to streaks and achievement badges
Some major focus on bringing our community together. There are hundreds of thousands of you using Pickwatch, let's talk picks!

On top of all that, we'll likely be adding a new sport (EPL) and there will be lots of small improvements to make. That's where we value your feedback most. Someone cornered me in a bar and told me their saved password didn't work - so we fixed it! The more you tell us what annoys you, what you want to see, and what would make this even better, the easier it is, and the more likely you get exactly what you want.

Our job is to help you make better picks, and take the hard work out of it. I think we've done that pretty well in 2023, and I look forward to delivering an even better experience in 2024

Thanks for your support, and have a great Christmas and New Year,

The Pickwatch team - Shaun, Ryan, Adam, Rhys, Tanuj, Oliver, Devin, and Thomas,