Betway Online Casino

Designing a world class online gambling experience.

Interaction Design, Research & Team Leadership

THE CHALLENGE

The Betway Casino lobby is the post registration customer experience for the Betway Casino product. In March of 2013, Betway underwent an extensive re-branding exercise.

Part of the rebrand included moving the Casino product offered by Betway away from a download / executable experience to an entirely web based one - a fundamental shift in the business that ran the risk of alienating core customer base as they would then be expected to adjust to an entirely browser-based experience.

Unfortunately, a sub-optimal temporary website was rushed out the door to fulfill this requirement.

Shortly after joining the company, I reccommended that we revisit the casino product as a matter of urgency.

WHAT WE DID

I led an effort to redesign Betway Casino experience that aimed to:

• Provide an experience that would wean existing users off of our clunky, anachronistic download client
• Address the many usability and responsiveness issues of the legacy product
• Be robust enough to serve as a white label solution to allow for easy adaptation for multiple markets / languages
• Provide a proof of concept platform for the Betway Universal Navigation System (B.U.N.S)

KICK OFF SESSION - Focusing on users at the very beginning of a project sets a solid user-centred foundation for us as user experience practitioners. To this end, I compiled a series of questions to be answered by the stakeholders to ensure technical issues, business aims, user and project objectives were collated and combined prior to taking the next step.

USABILITY AUDIT - I formulated a usability audit of the temporary product to highlight my concerns regarding its effectiveness.

USABILITY TEST - I Conducted a contextual usability test & report with a view to further communicating to the business my rationalisations for wanting to revisit the temporary product.

USER JOURNEYS - Conducting interviews with product owners and consulting with our analytics department provided valuable insights into user's behaviours which I could then translate into validated user journeys.

REITERATIVE WIREFRAMING - Wireframing the journey for both the acquisition process as well as the gameplay lobby continued soon thereafter. Using a Build > Review > Reiterate production cycle meant I was confident we were on the right path as the project progressed.

DESIGN & BUILD - Working closely with a UI design member of my team, as well as a representative from the brand team, I oversaw the interpretation of the wireframes into brand-sensitive, annotated designs. These documents serve as a point of reference for our production team as well as forming the basis of our constantly evolving online brand deployment guide. I was also highly engaged during the development / testing process to ensure that all interactions functioned as expected.

OUTCOMES

This project was developed as a white label solution for all Betway Casino products which will be progressivley rolled out across 15 languages. Since launching in Belgium (Dutch, English & French), we have seen a marked increase in sign-ups and revenue, as well as an overwhelming number of users migrating to our web based casino lobby who were previously using the download client.