Casumo Sports

Background

“Casumo, a casino.”

That was the slogan we used not longer than 2 years ago. Up until that point, we had focused most of our efforts on continuously improving our casino and the core experiences. Casumo has long been bringing innovation to the world of online gambling, and the players have come to expect this.

But they also started expecting the ability to place bets on their weekend football matches. And ice-hockey in Sweden. And on pesäpallo in Finland. Times change, most casinos now have sportsbooks, and with compliance becoming ever so stringent, launching a sportsbook was also a way we could spread the risk. So the business decided we needed a sportsbook, fast. And “fast” is key here and sets the tone for this post, there was no time for thorough investigations and development work. We needed a way to launch an MVP sportsbook as fast as we could. The idea was to launch it and keep on improving it.

Understanding the limitations

Designing a true MVP is easier said than done. I had gotten used to working with plenty of resources to build much smaller features. 

Casumo had already partnered with Kambi to get odds from them on Kicks. It was confirmed we were going to use Kambi for this project too. A team was assembled to work on this project, and with the timeline, we were given, we quickly realised we just cannot build the whole solution. 

We, therefore, started looking at their White label solution. Since we couldn’t rebuild all the frontend with the logic it contains, we knew we’re going to have to use most of it. 

Research

Given the short and sweet nature of the brief we were given, we decided to invest time to investigate and understand the root problems of every other sportsbook. I wanted to learn from their mistakes. Issues they might not even be aware of. The easiest way to kickstart this was the stalk.

Competition analysis

We quickly noticed that there are quite a few competitors who use Kambi and who have done some adaptations themselves. So I made a list. All competitors who run Kambi, and what features they edited, added or removed. This helped us understand what we were probably looking at and the taboo areas that no one dared touch.

User tests

We started by launching several user tests on Kambi’s solution. We asked the participants to complete multiple tasks. We shot a shotgun here, we targeted experienced punters, people interested in sports but don’t bet, even a few people who gamble but don’t usually place bets on sports. The biggest lesson I learnt from this exercise was the importance of Browse. I had always assumed that if a player needs to find something fast, they search. Most people browsed. This could have been for one of two reasons;

We followed by launching the same scripts to the competitors who were listed above. This gave us really great insights, and, I believe, saved us a lot of time. We quickly learned what worked and what didn’t. We added the findings from this analysis to the competition analysis. This made it really easy to see the overlaps.

Interviews

Since we launched multiple user tests, we took the opportunity to also ask the subjects some questions, mostly to learn about their behaviour. Rather than a written outcome, we decided to add the questions to the tests. That way they would send us their recording and not an answer we wanted to hear. By putting the subjects on the spot, we could hear their tone, giving us a little more honest insight.

Frontend investigation

I worked close to frontend to understand what the limitations at hand were. This made it easy to identify the lowest hanging fruits. 

The biggest challenges; the biggest solutions

Navigation

On Casumo, we have a side-navigation on our desktop and tablet products, and a burger menu on mobile. Kambi’s default navigation features the same. We can’t have 2 burger menus.

We took this problem and turned it into the biggest product differentiator we have. We displayed the sports on top, in a horizontal scrolling component. We used a similar pattern to how game thumbnails are displayed on Casino. Not only did we solve navigation for sports, but a similar pattern was built to solve navigation in Casino.

I am particularly proud of the live toggle here. We originally launched without it, but quickly started hearing people complain of a lack of a live lobby. Players had already become accustomed to it in other Sportsbooks. The solution we built was simple, intuitive and very effective. We tested various versions of it and found it to be significantly better than what was implemented by our competitors.

Overwhelming choices

Kambi offers over 50 different sports and displays the most popular sports, then reveals all the sports in one click. When we tested Kambi’s solution, we found that while this wasn’t a problem for the advanced punter, it very much was for the newbies… we found they were going happy on the back button. They were getting lost.

We added a screen on to onboard the punters when sportsbook is launched for the first time. Before throwing our players immediately in the deep end and letting them figure out the UI, we decided to ask them to choose the sports and football leagues they were interested in.

This gives our players the ability to customise their UI to their needs and gives us vital information about our players early on. We can use this information (favourite sports and leagues) to segment players early on, before they even place a bet, and promote events they are likely to care for the most, rather than shooting blindly.

The homepage

Kambi’s solution had several events, in most cases live matches. So the homepage only really appeals to the players who like placing live bets. But we noticed they too were getting lost, as there was no particular order in which the events were displayed.

There was no way we could control what was displayed on Kambi’s default homepage, so we decided to remove it altogether. It did not make sense to give the player the option to just see basketball matches, only to bombard him with football or tennis as soon as they land on Casumo Sports. Instead, we decided to prioritise the navigation by using bold big sports icons, and have the player land on the most popular sports they chose.

However, here we had to choose. We had to optimise for one device, and ‘make it work’ for the other. There wasn’t much of a discussion, we decided to optimise for mobile. This was a very interesting approach, as I used to usually create different experiences for different devices.

We are also currently in the process of porting all the desktop functionality to mobile, with the idea to kill the desktop site shortly, so the timing couldn’t be better. I think we have come up with a neat solution for scaling up the mobile navigation to desktop and implemented a solution that is now going to be used to handle the thumbnails for Casino.

Bonuses

This is most probably the part given least love in any casino/sportsbook. Sports bonuses, usually contain a lot of terms, and for some reason, they’re usually the hardest to find and split from the casino bonuses.

So, as simple as it sounds, we wanted to display the bonuses in one centralised place. We also wanted to facilitate using the bonus. Typically, a player would have to go through sportsbook to find the a bonus such as, “Place 2 accumulator total goal bets on any Serie A, Italy match on an outcome over 2.5 and unlock this €5.00 free bet. Minimum bet amount €10.00. Offer expires on 21/12/2019 at 23:59.” There would probably also be the significant terms coupled with the description. After the players read all that, they’re expected to remember everything, browse to the Serie A matches (yeah, they would usually not contain any link), and remember to place 2 accumulators on just total goals, make sure both outcomes are over 2.5. It’s like the system is designed to fail the punters from placing qualifying bets.

Our take on sports bonuses;

1. Merge the sports bonuses with the casino bonuses (we use what we call valuables).

2. Make them somewhat different so one can distinguish between a casino bonus and a sports bonus.

3. Add a clear CTA that takes them right where they need to be to use the valuable.

4. Add aid, so the player is reminded of their bonus.

The tests made the punters so excited. The solution is under development.

Future-proofing

That is what we have thus far, but since we needed to future proof the product, I spent some time and created this map of where I see the product going soon. This was extremely well received by the team and by other teams who in some way interface with us.

I also spent some time designing some solutions that Casumo Sport could benefit from quickly.

Learnings

This was a huge project, and in retrospect, there are so many things we could have done to optimise the process. Here are some things I will take more seriously in the future.

Dependencies

The team had to learn to navigate around unfamiliar terrains and sometimes even step on other people’s toes to get things done. Things like the registration progress, landing pages, wallet and the bonus engine are all areas that we had to somehow change without having the full knowledge of the codebase. This slowed us down and threw all estimations out of the window. Clearly planning for these dependencies and clearer communication channels with the owners of the other domains would have contributed greatly.

Another dependency that slowed us down was the redesign. After a couple of months, Casumo Sports was silently launched, Casumo did a redesign. This meant that we had to redesign the Kambi client and reskin it from the ground up. This meant I had to design and redesign. And unfortunately, the Sketch file I was provided to use was not the best I have ever seen.

Team motivation

This builds on the former. Inaccurate work estimation and domain overlap here are the biggest culprits. This lead some members of the team to lose motivation. This is something to be taken very seriously, as a demotivated team is a lot less efficient than a happy one. Accurate scoping of the work and a driver could have cushioned the impact.

Clear business goals

I felt that if the business goals were communicated in advance, we could have done less guesswork. The project goals should have been part of the brief and not one of the project deliverables. This meant we did a lot of legwork before we could start to visualise what the project could look like.

Playing devil’s advocate here; the lack of project goals in advance gave us room to explore avenues we would have otherwise completely ignored. It was fun, and a great challenge. Not having any restrictions but time, however, tends to paralyse.