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 accessing regulated markets.

‍

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

‍

Challenges

• Regulatory requirements: We had to understand our requirements to be considered a social casino. This involved understanding how we extend our system to a sweepstake competition, which was the hurdle around this. By looking at our competition, we could start to evaluate where our strengths and weakenesses lie when we go t launch.
• User's conceptual models: We had to try and create an intuitive pathway towards payments. Since users do not bet with a FIAT currency we had create a clear pathway for them to buy virtual coin bundles.
• Tight deadline: We wanted to launch this product within 3 months, this naturally meant we would need clarity in our requirements to understand what MVP was and what would be considered a fast follow up.

‍

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 how we would tackle our deadline.

‍

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

‍

‍

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.

‍

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 scaled and noted any distinct variations for this market (e.g. Gold Coin bundles). We worked very closely with our Legal department to ensure that even wording would protect our operational capabilities, because if we didnt adhere to them, we could get shut down.

‍

Some outcomes we were incredibly proud of were: 

1. Growth to 13,000 daily active users
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