Safety first: How we designed Responsible Sports Gambling for 10M bettors

July 2022 • Product Design • UK

Gambling is fun.

Yes, most of the readers might disagree with us and ask: "What about its addiction"?

Well, we are not advocating gambling, but definitely as responsible members of this society, we do advocate ‘gamble responsibly’. Our client, Six Sigma Sports just like us wanted us to provide a safe gambling environment for users.

There is a thin line between gambling and ‘gambling responsibly’.

Gambling should only ever be a form of entertainment. But sometimes, things can go a little too far.

The problems:

Looking at the stats and market, we couldn’t overlook this problem. This got us to thinking HMW as designers:

  • Help bettors play responsibly?

  • Help people with gambling addiction?

Here’s how we made it happen:

Easy find-ability of the Responsible Gambling feature

We had to make this section easy to find on the app to help users with addiction problem.

Our card sorting exercise led us to put ‘Responsible gambling’ section along with other settings on the Header on desktop (and on top app bar in mobile), which was unlike most betting platforms in the industry today –  where this section is placed hidden in some nook or at the end scroll of a page.

Making the settings understandable and easily usable

When we looked at the current trends in market for Responsible gambling, all we found was confusing settings and difficult to access features.

Decluttered and clean interface, and use of crisp and clear descriptions helps both novice and veteran users understand how to go about using this feature for good.

The settings are laid out in an increasing order of gambling addiction, starting with simple settings like setting bet limits, to more punishing settings like deactivating account.

Designing for Addicts: Alarm clock based design

To help users – novice or veteran – we gave them access to different types of controls such as self exclusion, reminder, time out, bet amount limits, etc.

A bettor can use any combination of these settings to help minimize their gambling addiction. For example, a person with overspending issues can set up bet limits which allow only a particular amount to be deposited per day. A person who’s spending too much time on 

Our alarm clock wakes us up by interrupting us with a sound. We followed a similar interrupt driven design for instances when a gambling setting limit has been reached.

Summary

Designing for gambling addict users was a learning for us too. In this process we untapped our creativity to find out solutions to this problem to bring out the best experience for our users.

We encourage you to try responsible gambling in the Six Sigma Sports product.

Set once, and play safe!

Having worked with many UX designers over the years, I was impressed by the team’s ability to quickly grasp the fundamentals of our complex business domain.

- CEO, Six Sigma Sports, UK

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