Stake US

Project Overview

We were tasked with building a social casino within the United States; a tightly regulated market with few but highly proficient competitors. The business goal was to be the number one online social casino within the United States to grow our gaming product range and access regulated markets. This was a market that was worth USD 6 billion in 2022 and from our strategic research, the opportunity existed for a  market entrance of a new competitor.

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Deliverables

1. Research Report (Competitive Research, User Research and MVP Research)
2. Adding to our design system
3. High Fidelity Design that adheres to regulatory compliance

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Challenges

• Regulatory requirements: We had to understand our requirements to be classified as a social casino. This involved understanding how we extend our current wagering system to a sweepstake competition - think of McDonalds monopoly; you buy a burger you get given a free token, it would be illegal to buy the token. In this vein, users were buying a "Gold Coin" (GC) that was irredeemable, and they receive free "Stake Cash" (SC) which is redeemable.
  
  • Legal wording on mandated pages was crucial as this could lead to regulatory enforcement.
• User's conceptual models: We had to create an intuitive pathway towards payments. Since users do not wager in a FIAT currency (USD) on this system we had create a clear pathway for them to buy virtual coin bundles and give them the ability to wager in two virtual currencies of their choice (GC & SC).
• Tight deadline: We wanted to launch this product within 3 months, this naturally meant we would need clarity in our requirements to understand what an MVP looked like and what would be considered a fast follow up.

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Competitive Research

In order to understand our point of difference in the social casino market for the US, we had to look at our competitors to undertake a SWOT analysis which could give us indication of the areas we should focus in market entry and the areas we should delay for future development. This competitive research created the focal point of many cross-collaborative discussions to understand what our requirements were and the subsequent launch of our product.

This meant working with legal, customer support, marketing engineering and product to ensure alignment on our launch date.

VGW Holdings

An Australian company that dominates the US social casino scenes with some well known brands: Chumba Casino, Pulsz Casino and Lucky Land Slots. Some of the findings are detailed below

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Finding from competitive research:

• Visual branding: The majority of online social casino's have very incongruent branding of their platform which comes off as unrefined from a product positioning perspective. The overuse of gradients and colours can really take away from the main aspect to any gambler, playing the game - which is crucial. If you think about a platform like AirBnB, a user has a plethora of choices in the form of a variety of housing types, AirBnB's UI is simple and lets the each dwelling's charm come off with photos but the AirBnB platform is cohesive for a user, this is what a gambling platform should aim to replicate.
• Products for users: Gamblers have a variety of products that adhere to the gaming styles they wish to play, whether its lower RTP scratch cards, instant games or even live casino's. From our research we deeply understood there was an opportunity for us to be the first social casino to offer Live Casino as a product offering.
• Payments: Most social casinos use FIAT (traditional currency) payments through various cards or bank transfers. We could be the first to offer cryptocurrency given we had already built the technology stack to support this.
• Deep KYC is mandatory: We knew we could try and make a registration form that was less cumbersome and enable users to provide higher quality KYC details.
• Build mobile first: many of our competitors websites are optimised for desktop, with the growing demand for mobile experiences, we would focus on mobile first.

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Brand Positioning Graph

What we clearly understood after our competitive research was that we had the ability to utilise our existing brand in a new market. From much of our user research, gamblers generally switch platforms periodically to receive account bonuses. From many brand perception tests we have done throughout our time, people always thought Stake was the most professional and aesthetically clean platform they had come accross.

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MVP Plan

• Produce high fidelity wireframes for handoff - Whilst a large amount of our website could replicated from our international site there are some key UX flows that had to be designed for this particular regulated market: 
  
  1. Sign-up flow - we started to embed a multistep approach as regulation required us to incorporate many new fields that didn't exist in past.
  2. KYC flow - this would be tied to the requirements of our integration partner
  3. Payments flow - allowing a user to buy bundles of GC and receive free SC 
  4. Redemption flow - redeeming your Stake Cash which could be sent to two differnt pathways; this has not been done before.
  5. Top Up flow - a regulated requirement to give people free virtual coins to play with
  6. Wager Requirement flow - this was crucial as if you deposited money, we had to create indicative pathways in the redemption process to inform a user they need to wager before they could redeem their SC.
  7. Wallet experience - we created an easy wallet switch button that could allow users to play between the two digital coins
• Work with the visual design team to plan out any assets needed for carousels
• Test flows with American social casino gamers through UserTesting.com, since we didn't have a current US user base we had to rely on UserTesting to recruit potential users. Our benchmark was at least an 80% success rate for flows which we managed to achieve.
• Work with the CRM team to develop social media plan and an email event plan for key touchpoints on the user journey

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Outcomes

Our design team worked very closely with the Chief Product Officer and the Head of Engineering to ensure our designs from our Stake Platform could be adopted and scaled for; there is a natural variation of certain elements but we found them to eventually be minimal. We worked very closely with our Legal department to ensure that  wording across CTA's, disclaimers and marketing material would suffice regulation which would thus, protect our operational capabilities, because if we didn't adhere to them, we could get shut down.

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Some outcomes we were incredibly proud of: 

1. Growth to 13,000 daily active users in 6 months.
2. Revenue growth within the Stake US product of 300%
3. Creating crypto and fiat payment methods to enable users to make payments within the comofrtability of their choice.
4. The continuation of the best VIP loyalty program within the online gambling industry.
5. A truly mobile first experience

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Fast Follow-Up

• Uplift of the wager requirement flow
• Improve our help touchpoints on the website and direct them to help centre articles
• Reflect a new design of our VIP information page

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