- Connect to API from all major bookmakers
- Compare all available Acca odds for upcoming events
- Rank sites with best odds
- Discover Acca by league or sport
- Send user to bookmakers with affiliate tag
The initial aim was to design, build and run an affiliate sports news portal targeting the Australian market, Sportsbetta.com. We would post regular video content bringing genuinely useful betting tips on upcoming events in the sporting calendar, in particular horse racing.
Unfortunately it was tough to find an expert content writer and provider of racing tips – the friend who we’d pinned our hopes on returned to Australia to follow his passion, becoming a racing presenter on Sky Sports. In fact the project was far too ambitious, and not long after having built the site and set up the affiliate accounts, we shelved the project and parted ways.
Two years later another friend approached me with an idea for building a betting accumulator app. He liked the concept for Sportbetta, but it was too big and we should look at starting with something small. So we designed and built a slimmed down version of a sportbetting app, which searched for the best accumulator bets, or ‘acca’ bets as they are also known, and directed users to our affiliated partners, Accabetta.com. The app was iOS only, and we utilised the help of a company based in India to build the app in Xcode for iPhone.
This project was mostly an experiment, and we knew there was a user desire to place accumulator (or ‘acca’) bets. Mike had a few years under his belt working as a senior marketing exec for a sports betting company. We just wanted to try using a standalone app rather than a bloated sports app, and all honestly we didn’t do any user research for this project other than competitor analysis.
Before starting the designing, we engaged in some competitor analysis to see if there was a gap in the market for a streamlined accumulator bet comparison app. At the time many of the sports betting apps were rather clunky and bloated, and we thought that there might be room for a quickfire, simple app where bettors could quickly view the most favorable accumulator odds and place bets in real-time while engaging with a sporting event.
The user would be redirected to a pre-populated betting slip in the operators site where they could place the best instantly. We would receive a financial reward for each user we introduce to operators.
- Dark UI
- Fast to access odds
- Clear ranking
- Deeplink to specific event on bookmaker site
- Multiple Accas
- Reveal promos
I began with wireframing the keys screens in Balsamiq, before storyboarding all screens. Feedback was received from friends and colleagues familiar with betting apps.
The prototype consisted of all key screens designed in high fidelity using Photoshop. This was before Sketch and Figma, or even Invision. Detailed documentation by means of storyboards, with annotations for the interactions, would assist the developers in India that we had appointed to the project.
Weekly meetings were set up to monitor the progress with the developer team lead, and help with their questions.
We actually had some serious difficulties working with the team in India. The first draft they supplied was incredibly poor, and we had to push for months to get a polished result. In the end we had an app on the App Store that looks as good as the designs, and appeared at first to function as it was supposed to. However we soon realised that that the APIs were not incorporated properly and there were big problems with the functionality in general.
It turned out that my project partner Mike moved to Sydney for a new job and at the same time I was offered a job in Malta, so Accabetta was sadly abandoned. However it was great learning experience in terms of app design and functionality, plus working with developers on a relatively complex product. I expect the outcome would have been very different nowadays, with it becoming the norm to work with product development teams remotely. The tools are infinitely better, plus we have efficient communication and PM tools like Slack and Clickup.
