6 things I learned from doing betting & sports UX
*Which turned out to be more relevant in other industries than expected.
Online betting is an ever-growing market. More and more apps are popping up every day with hundreds of things to bet on. However, there are still not that many gaming and betting-specific UX resources available online, and I’m hoping to see that pool grow.
When I started working for a betting company, — being a non-native English speaker and a non-bettor, the learning curve was pretty steep. The first couple of weeks were a blur of people showing me screens and saying dozens of abbreviations and industry jargon. Nonetheless, that gave me the motivation to learn more about both betting and bettors, and I enjoyed working on industry-specific challenges.
In this story I’ll share some of the key learnings. They all came from working on a betting product, but you will see that they can be applied to a wider range of industries. :)
1. Know your customer.
I know this sounds very generic, but it is key. There are numerous personas and journeys that exist within the world of betting, so make sure to define the customer for every project. Your brand will have a specific core customer base and marketing can give you loads about your users’ online preferences and behaviours, but make sure to conduct some UX research as well.
Too often we are told that the product or feature are for everyone —that’s too broad to create a meaningful AND measurable experience. Even the basic characteristics — such as horse-racing or football bettor, novice, ‘expert’, tech savvy — can be invaluable. One example from my experience— a Christmas campaign. The company wanted to make a special Christmas-related promotion across the holiday season and me and my teammates were asked to run an idea generation workshop. As a warm-up, we asked everyone to create a . The result was amazing — we got a few similar traits but also some striking differences; it was brilliant to see how this prompted a conversation about who the campaign is for and how it fits into those people’s holiday routines. Without this 15-minute discussion, we would have ended up trying to please everyone, which never works out.
2. Stats are a blessing in disguise.
Betting is a very information-heavy industry. But stats can be deceptive. The first reaction is that adding more stats is good, because this provides more objective data to help users make informed decisions. However, it’s easy to overwhelm people with a plethora of numbers and icons, where nothing stands out, or worse, it’s impossible to say what all the icons and abbreviations mean. That said, some customers are very number-driven and get even more excited when they can dig deep into some serious stats. If you follow the advice from the previous paragraph, you should be able to figure out where your customers stand in relation to stats and how to display them best.
3. Align with key industry players
By that, I mean aligning specifically on taxonomy and some navigation patterns. Since the barrier to entry is quite low, your users are likely to have accounts with your competitors. Therefore, by using different naming conventions, you might contribute to users’ cognitive overload and create confusion. You don’t want them to struggle navigating, do you? And if they can’t find what they are looking for fast enough, they won’t stick around. This doesn’t mean you need to copy someone else’s navigation or (please don’t!) recreate bad or dark patterns. Simply be aware of how the others tackle the same journey and test out what feels most natural to your user.
4. Step outside the industry for inspiration.
That said about aligning on certain things, keep your eyes open and look outside the betting industry for inspiration. You can find parallels with lots of areas from e-commerce to grocery shopping. Competitor research is key, but looking at players outside the industry and monitoring tech and design trends will help you stay ahead of direct competition. Moreover, today direct competition is not always the biggest one, since so many activities and apps are competing for users’ attention. You can see how a lot of companies, including the betting ones, recently have been taking inspiration from rapidly developing fin tech. In my daily work, a few methods have been most helpful, such as nudging workshop participants to think of their favourite digital experiences from other industries, sharing particularly good or interesting interface solutions on team slack and running ‘innovation’ sessions.
5. Be creative and go beyond lab testing.
However big your time and money resources are, lab testing is not going to be enough. Betting is hugely context-driven, it’s about being in the moment, seeing an opportunity, testing the knowledge of the game— you cannot recreate the same mindset in the lab. Therefore, you need to get creative to validate some of the things you are working on. My team and I tried a wide range of techniques from interactive prototypes with real-time data to pub sessions to recreating a living room with a game on. During my first month I organised a pub session and it felt like applying all the theory I’ve been learning from my product team to practice. You know how they say a picture is worth a thousand words? Well, seeing users in their ‘natural environment’ is worth even more 😇 It was eye-opening to actually observe how people bet, how they watch football and socialize at the same time.
6. And, finally, always experiment and innovate.
This is one of the most exciting things about working in UX — you can do anything. The industry is ripe for new exciting experiences. You can already see some companies being ahead of the curve with VR-experiences and mixed reality, like the NBA VR experience, but for betting and sports it is only the beginning and the playing field is endless. We have the luxury of different channels and dimensions to use to enrich in-app experience. And if other industries are anything to go by, the demand is there.
And what were the biggest learnings you got from your industry?
