As we’d rolled out the new OBG Casino product, we decided to incorporate a multiplay feature. However this would need to be redesigned with an improved user flow, and and which would interact nicely with the casino’s new features.
Our research had shown that there was a desire from our VIP players to play 2, 3 or even 4 games simultaneously. There was also a massive benefit to the company: playing 4 games at once could equate to 4 times as much revenue. Of course there was a downside too, which was that a player could burn through their funds very quickly, become unhappy and leave. Overall it worked well for a few VIPs on Betsafe, who were valuable enough that we retained this feature.
However it lacked some refinement in UX, closing, adding and switching games, searching for games and so on.
Unfortunately I no longer have the initial wireframes or Invision prototype. However, I should be noted there were several core challenges in designing this feature.
Player must be able to:
- Swap the game in each window for a new one
- Use full screen search to find any game
- Add 1, 2, or 3 game windows
- Fast execution
- Favourite or unfavourite each game
- Maximise viewable game size
Solution must not:
- Allow players to close a game ‘by accident’
- Take player away from game to lobby
The biggest mistake we could have made would be to allow the user to close games by accident, which would have made our players unhappy had they been in a bonus round for example.
I had designed a mobile version of this too, where there were smaller thumbnails for additional games, with one game in focus taking up most of the screen. But there were speed issues on mobile at that time where we needed to think about players on less powerful phones that couldn’t handle the processing power required to run 4 games at once. On desktop it makes sense and remains a core feature of the casino product to this day.
