Sportsbet is Australia’s premier online bookmaker with a variety of wagering options on a vast range of sporting events. Working within a large project team, I acted as a Product Design Lead spread across multiple feature teams to design a native mobile Android experience. Leveraging the Material Design framework for the basis of the visual design, I was involved with leading the prototyping, ideation and testing through to defining the end to end experience and visual design for the app.
The need for a native Android experience to reinforce Sportsbet as Australia’s premier online bookmaker meant going back to basics and keeping things simple.
The Sportsbet brand is fun, loud and playful. Their irreverent TVC’s and marketing campaigns are instantly recognisable all around Australia. It was important to make sure the Sportsbet brand was evident throughout the app but not applied in such a way that it was overpowering and effected the user experience. Keeping the interface clean and simple with the enormous amount of features in the app was the main challenge.
The new visual approach for the app was to use unique, branded illustrations where possible to reinforce the sports theme which helped to reinforce the Sportsbet brand in the marketplace. In advocating a user-centered design approach across the project, the team of designers and engineers worked to create an easy-to-use and intuitive mobile betting experience. You can check out the visual case study of this project on Behance.com.
The typical Sportsbet customer spans a wide variety of demographics. In order to properly define who these customers were, the team created personas to help segment customer goals, behaviours and pain points. The personas were informed by previous research that was conducted prior to project kick-off.
The personas helped us construct a narrative around the different types of customers so we could understand and empathise with with them throughout the entire product development process. The personas also helped us communicate some of the more detailed research insights to project stakeholders.
We held co-design workshops consisting of preliminary sketching sessions with Product Mangers and Senior Stakeholders on the project. These sessions gave the design team a broader understanding of the problems, potential features, layouts and allowed other team members to express themselves through sketches, storyboards and flows.
The design team emphasized the importance of spending time in the ‘problem space’ to properly define what the actual problems were that we were trying to solve rather than jumping straight into solution-mode. The outputs from these workshops gave us some valuable ideas and insights in solving some major challenges with the design.
In focusing on connecting customers to their favourite racing and sporting events as quickly as possible, we started by mapping out a detailed IA which formed the basis of the prototype. The IA allowed the design team to map out pathways where we explored flows that focused on speed and encouraging discovery through recommendations.
By utilising the Material Design Framework as the basis of our design, it allowed us to rapidly prototype large sections of the app which then flowed seamlessly into the visual design component of the project. These wireframes were then used across extensive user testing and focus group sessions with Sportsbet customers to gather further insights.
So what did Sportsbet customers really want with a mobile betting experience? Speed? Simplicity? More features? Free holidays? Chocolates?
Speed was crucial to determine the overall user experience which was a key focus when designing the app.
Keeping the interface clean and simple with the large amount of features we had to fit into the app was an enormous challenge. The design team knew that when customers wanted to place a bet, the experience had to be FAST and simple which we delivered to customers all over Australia. With instant access to additional data such as live scores, form guides, race results and speed maps, the extra data provided added value for Sportsbet customers to enhance their betting experience.
Project outcomes
110
Users successfully onboarded to new Android app
182
Revenue in the first 6 months of launch of new app
47
Increase in new user signups via the Android app