Score

To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I removed confidential information from this case study and changed the name of the product, and there will be some gaps in the arguments I bring forward. All information is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of Casumo.

Background

From a design and front-end perspective, the project is currently almost completed, but due to platform-related and other back-end issues, the project was put on hold and didn’t yet launch.

When I was led into the project, a lot of the groundwork had already been done. Casumo had appointed an external agency to conduct user research and help us with designing and building the interface. My role in the start was to support the agency and facilitate.

Shortly after, we started taking over, until eventually the project was completely moved inhouse with a team of around 6 people. I was the designer most hands-on, as the other product designer involved in the project was leading the initiative, so, being a small team, he was spending most of his time doing everything like project management, negotiations, meetings with C-level, hiring… so he had very little time for design. However, it was very good to have another design sitting next to me, I was bouncing ideas with him all the time.

The challenge

Sports betting products are too complex and include a lot of barriers. They look more like a Microsoft Spreadsheet document than an exciting product.

Football is one of the most passion-driven sports. Millions in the UK are obsessed with the sport, usually, hang out with people who share the same interest… so football brings people together and is a very common discussion topic. Many of the fans are young, so they may be also into mobile gaming users and forms of gambling other than betting. We were able to identify 3 broad segments;

59% - Casual fans who do not gamble

38% - Obsessed fans who do not gamble

3% - Fans who gamble on football

The direction

How do we design an app for 97%, in a business that is extremely saturated and competitive?

When I joined, we had already determined that we were going to. This determined the realm I operated in the short and hectic couple of months I was involved in this project.

An entertainment app

Not gambling, not gaming, entertainment. Sportsbook apps are flooded with information, with every last inch filled with numbers and terminology that mean nothing to someone who never placed a bet. The app needed to be delightful to use. 

Refined in every way

We were building an app that looks and feels great. Since the app was not going to look like another sportsbook to attract the wider audience, we needed to build trust and attract higher spenders as well as those placing small stakes.

A Casumo product

Casumo had a reputation of having clean user-friendly interfaces. So this product needed to also show these values; friendly, simple and playful.

High-level solutions

The direction we had taken with this app when I joined this project was extremely interesting. Sportsbook was being completely rethought.

Simplification

Simplification is not easy. If I were to design a social media app, I would study Instagram, Twitter… I would have looked at their architecture, but there was not much I could look at. We invested a great deal of time in stripping everything down to the very core. This was achieved on multiple fronts.

Let’s start with odds removal. This was probably the boldest decision we had made. For a newbie, odds can be overwhelming. Removing them may make it a little less appealing for the advanced user - in fact, we were planning on adding a feature that would enable odds if the player prefers to see odds. But advanced users were never our primary target here.

This put the selection on the forefront, odds skew what the players bet on. We wanted the player to bet on the outcome they feel is most possible.

Sportsbooks usually brag on the number of bet markets they offer. On all their sports. On all their events. We went the other way with Score. Other than just having football, we also heavily limited the bet markets to just five. We also humanly presented the bet-markets. I know I sound like I’m just throwing in buzz words, but how is a newbie able to make sense of “Asian handicap” or “First half Scorecast”? We chose the basic bet markets and renamed them. “Full time” became “Who will win?” and “Final score” became “Predict the final score”.

Playful

We wanted the player to always get value from the app, not necessarily monetary. We wanted to reward the player for micro-interactions such as logging in… and we did that using virtual currencies. Much like many casual games, virtual currencies and levels are inexpensive and are really good at giving that sense of progression.

Virtual currency buys card packs that contain random cards. Cards are our take on bonuses, different cards had different levels and represent different bonuses. A player could use the same cards to boost odds, get insurance on bets, or just simply boost the amount of Stamina (virtual currency) one could get from placing a bet.

I cannot delve into a lot more detail here, as most of this work was done before I joined the team.

The look

Our focus was to always deliver the minimum required for the player to move on. In sportsbook, typically, from the same screen, a player can find a bet and place it. Finding and placing a bet in Score would have taken an advanced player slightly longer than if they did it on another typical sportsbook, but the newbie wound has probably not even been able to place it - not confidently.

Instead of cramming everything that fits in the screen, we went for a light approach. Each screen stripped from excessive information. We used colourful graphics that give the app a unique look.

The feel

The look, however, is only half the magic. What made the app stand out were the transitions and the interaction. All transactions were designed around a set of rules so the transitions look consistent. This gave the product a tactile feel and depth, but the overhead and complexity became greater.

Compliance

Since the groundwork was done by an external agency, many details were not ironed out and the product could not go live as it was not compliant to the MGA and UKGC due to several reasons. I spent quite some time making sure no stone is left unturned and we do not expose ourselves to unnecessary risks.

Highlighted flows

These are the areas I spent the most time working on. I can in no way take all credit of these flows, as a lot of work was already done before I joined the project, but I spent quite some time refining these areas.

Stake selection

Typically, the stake amount is part and parcel with the betslip. In our case, since we removed all odds, we used this to show the value of the bet. 

Country selector

The country selector is the first screen the player sees as they log in. We did several optimisations on this screen.

League selector

When we tested the screen, we noticed many players didn’t feel confident with switching between different leagues. Most of the screen real estate was occupied by games. We did an adjustment that highlights the leagues. It was very well received by the players and was surprisingly discoverable.

Live match data

Since we were also going to support live betting, we knew that in some cases, players might not be in front of their TV watching the game. We wanted a way to show this activity without attracting too much attention, as we wanted the focus to always be on the bet itself.

Betslip

Originally we had an already betslip that supported only single bets, and that was very utilitarian. A little after I joined, the business decided we cannot launch without accumulator bets. An acca is one bet that links together two or more individual bets within. It is won if all outcomes win.

We realised that the design we had at the time was never going to allow us to mature the product in that direction. So we decided to rebuild it from the ground up. After we user tested the version we had built, found that players could understand the concept of accumulator bets which was one of the biggest concerns we had.

Boosting bets cards

This needed to feel satisfying. We wanted the player to feel like they have control. We achieved this by giving the user access to all the cards they have, on the bet screen, and allowing the player to drag the card.

We also built some sort of a wizard that assists the player. Some cards work on limited bets and might be unavailable for some. Others worked best with high stakes. So to help the player decide when a bet is selected, the cards would shuffle into the best order. If the player adds another bet to the betslip or changes the stake amount, the cards may reshuffle if another card is more important, or for some reason, the bet does not fulfil the criteria needed. Tapping on an unavailable bet would share information on why the card does not qualify for the chosen outcome.

Card details

A detailed view of the card was necessary. Some cards were pretty complex, and we needed a way to explain them and to allow the player to evolve them. 

Errors

We noticed in some tests that when the connection is slow, the app was just freezing. We, therefore, invested some time to solve this issue. We worked on localised and global errors.

Conclusion

Since we had to shut it down before we even launched it, we could only rely on qualitative data. I really would have loved to look at some quantitative data, as I felt there were still some blind spots. I would have loved to see this baby go live and grow it. Maybe someday we go live with it.