Designing for Multi-Product, Multi-Brand

Betsson Group PLC is an established online gambling company that offers multiple products, including sports betting, casino games, and online poker, representing over 20 brands operating in 19 jurisdictions. With an ever increasing number of brand acquisitions, it became clear we needed to streamline our product offering so that one platform could support multiple brands in multiple markets.

This was a long term project that took over 3 years including the mobile product.

Simplify development process
Reduce operational cost
Increase efficiency
Faster feature roll out

Find games more easily
More features
Better overall user experience
Retain brand familiarity

Create a comprehensive platform for Betsson Group’s gaming products for desktop and mobile devices (this case study will focus on the casino for desktop). Initially, the platform would support the company’s three leading brands, integrating the unique features of each brand, plus increasing efficiency and profitability of Betsson’s product development process.

After conducting a UX audit, we would be able to identify the key issues. We would gather as much data as possible, from existing research, and conduct interviews with users. Key stakeholders would also provide input

It’s important to note that at the earliest stage we had around 7-8 UX Designers involved in the brainstorming process, with weekly discussions set up between us and tech to review wireframes. It was my role to take our collaborated vision, create wireframes, and subsequently reiterate the designs.

However, after a substantial company restructure, we were left as 3 designers on this project, and much of the initial ideation was scrapped. For the most part, the work was undertaken by me as UI / UX Designer as well as our Lead UX Designer.

At the time, we’d only very recently rolled out our new mobile casino, which set the groundwork to some degree for the ‘full fat’ desktop casino. I was significantly involved in that project as well as a UI designer. The brief was similar in that it would form the base platform for multiple casino brands, however the desktop version was a much more complex product and at that time was the key touch point for the vast majority of our users.

Before we were able to begin formulating ideas of how the new casino would look and behave, we would need to lean on other departments in the organisation to provide us with data and research.

UX audit of existing site
Key stakeholder Input
Data dive
Remote usability study
Revisit existing research (CX trackers, heat maps, VoC, etc)
Competitor Analysis

This would help us to identify customer pain points and requirements, pathing the way for us to build the foundations for a vastly improved, user focussed casino product.

The recent mobile site build had already provided us with a new navigational structure and category groupings, and helped us streamline features for a multibrand MVP. There were, however, significant issues that needed addressing specifically for the desktop product.

Visual appearance outdated
Navigation poor
Search basic and does not achieve desired result
Filtering non-existent
No personalisation available
My Account area extremely confusing
Looks like a different website completely from other products
Lobby features not accessible from gameplay area
Thumbnails small and not enticing

We split the product experience into 6 defined areas, which collectively make up the site as a whole. Within each area we identified the weaknesses in existing features, missing features that would improve the product overall, and each area would be given a much prettier UI treatment.

The tech team would also be working hard to make improvements to the site performance as well.

From this point we were three designers. Weekly sprints were set up with the development to review the wireframes. Generally we would begin designing a feature from wireframe in Sketch. From here we would move to high fidelity prototypes presented in Invision, beginning with just one brand, Nordicbet.

For the entirety of the project we used Sketch to design, and Invision to prototype, working through the feature list. We engaged in weekly sprints and refinements with development, while at the same time ensuring our design decisions met with the requirements of the commercial teams.

One of the key challenges was to have the product work across multiple brands with different colours, styles fonts, and logos. So we needed to build a design system.

We opted for a system based on Material, with our primary, secondary and tertiary colours, light and dark, and 9 different lightness of each colour. Coupled with Sketch plugin Camilo we were able to quickly adapt our design from one brand to another.

This is a complex topic and will be discussed in a separate article.

Finally a BETA version was released and it was unveiled to a small section of our players. We invited a handful of them to review the new site at Usability Partner’s specialist facility in Stockholm. The whole UX team sat behind the mirror for a full week while player engagement was analysed.

The feedback was generally positive, and highlighted areas we needed to improve on. Smaller problems arose like unreadable text sizes or colours, confusing icons, and other UI fixes.

It also revealed much larger issue such as the entire right sidebar was often not discovered at all, and most players didn’t understand how to claim their bonus.

The process was repeated for other brands. This would also give us feedback from different regions, as one brands tends to dominate its particular market.

Further user tests were done for small features using Hotjar and Usertesting.com.

Many participants in the Usability Labs tests liked the simplicity of the new design, clarity of the start page and the interface was commented on the startpage not being too ’busy’. It was perceived as being easy to find your way around the interface (at least when doing basic things – although they said it could be more difficult when it came to things they weren’t so familiar with). Some mentioned the amount of text being used was not so extensive and that was appreciated.

The study by usability partners showed a SUS score of 81%, which was considered a success overall and the BETA site was rolled out to all players by market.

Our intention was to migrate all brands over to the new platform, which has dominated our department’s activity since the build. As I write this 4 years later, we are now close to rolling out a series of game-changing updates to both the UI and UX. Update to follow.