Simply the bets: the sports betting operators hitting the mark with mobile UX and those falling short

For many years in the UK the gruff voice of actor Ray Winstone informed TV audiences that bet365 was the “world’s favourite online sports betting company”. So, it comes as no surprise that the Stoke-headquartered operator is often described as having the best sports betting app in the UK market. Not only that but it is also considered a leader in in-house tech and product development.

Having a sports betting app that is intuitive, easy to navigate, with a user-friendly interface and fast loading times could be the difference between whether a user stays with your product or decides to go elsewhere. A positive user experience (UX) is one that meets or exceeds the customer’s expectations, which in turn can boost retention and conversion rates as well as player loyalty, while, of course, a negative UX could lead to disappointment, frustration and a high churn rate.

Delving further into the performance of sports betting apps is boutique analyst firm Eilers & Krejcik Gaming (EKG), which published its Q4 2023 product analysis report in December for the UK market. The testing, which was conducted in-person over 17 days in October 2023, used a matrix of five scoring categories to rank the top 20 apps by user experience, betting interface, features (eg cash-out and live streaming), core (referring to key account management tools such as deposit and payment changes) and aesthetics. UX, in particular, covers app navigation, speed and how easy the app is to use.

Topping the charts yet again was bet365, attaining a total score of 17.7, with a near full-point gap separating it from Flutter Entertainment-owned rival Sky Bet in second place at 16.9. It was a close race between second, third and fourth place as William Hill also scored 16.9, while Paddy Power took the fourth spot with 16.8.

The report stated bet365 had no equal in the market when it came to betting interface and features, although EKG’s testers did identify login issues, which dented its UX score. The bet365 app was described as fast and easy to use, with swipe navigation setting it apart from its competitors. However, despite being referred to as “the gold standard”, the app ranked third for UX. Instead, first place for UX went to Paddy Power’s app, which was applauded for being fast and easy to navigate with a good search function. However, the lowlights listed by EKG included the absence of an obvious Home button, weak in-play UX compared to its peers, as well as the live streaming functionality not being up to par.

To garner views from the industry, EGR quizzes Adam Wilson, CEO of Splash Tech and co-founder of the former swipe-to-bet app Bookee, on who he believes is streets ahead in terms of UX. “I think bet365 stands alone. They are peerless and there is very little to choose between in the next tier down.”

At a pure UX level for a sportsbook, “bet365 is the best the industry has,” Propus Partners’ Matt Howard tells EGR. “It’s so simple to use. The most important thing is that customers need to be able to find what they’re looking for. Bet365’s layout just allows you to do that. Whether you think it’s particularly flashy or innovative is a completely different thing, but they’re making some quite interesting strides and making it more that way inclined.”

Aside from bet365, Howard also mentions Sky Bet in the UK and FanDuel in the US since both have built successful customer retention numbers backed up by solid UX. He explains: “This has been based around the UX and features of the product being simple to use and accessible; again not necessarily flashy but they are nice, simple apps that customers can log into, immediately understand what’s happening and where to go to find what they’re looking for.”

In the US, Lloyd Danzig, managing partner of Sharp Alpha Advisors, points to FanDuel and DraftKings as winning the product race by a large margin, not just for offering a wide array of betting markets but also in terms of speed, intuitiveness and reliability of the apps. “At present, FanDuel has the better SGP [same game parlay] product while DraftKings has the better micro-betting experience,” he comments.

The same can be seen in EKG’s H2 2023 US sports betting app report where FanDuel topped the list for the fourth time in a row, with a score of 17.9, grabbing a 0.8-point lead over its rival Draft-Kings. The Flutter-owned brand also had a clean sweep across the board, taking first place in all five categories. Similar to the aforementioned UK report, EKG’s US testing was conducted in-person over 17 days, but this time from late August to early September 2023 and limited to only 14 states.

Going on a journey

Looking back at the UK report, two other brands to score highly for UX were LiveScore Group’s LiveScore Bet, which ranked seventh overall (10th for UX) with a total score of 15.9, and Virgin Bet in ninth place (11th for UX) with a final score of 15.5. SBTech supplies the tech for these apps currently but both are due to switch to Kambi this quarter. The LiveScoreBet app was commended by EKG for its clean, intuitive layout, strong bet presentation and good in-app speed, although it would have scored higher for UX if there was a search function.

In response to the downsides mentioned for LiveScoreBet, including limited payment options, Chris Williams, head of sportsbook and ecosystem product at LiveScore Group, insists that both features are on its development roadmap. “We have been recently trialling versions of search. It goes back to continuously improving that frictionless experience and giving customers the ability to do what they want in a way that suits them.”

Elsewhere, Virgin Bet was described by EKG as having a “nice-looking app with a clear and intuitive layout”, and praised it for its live streaming, customer service and help options. However, testers reported it suffered from limited payment options, slow in-play bet acceptance and the betslip defaulting to a £10 stake, as on its sister app.

Across the industry, Williams argues that the focus should forever be on why the customer is there in the first place – to find, place and track bets, and to have them settled quickly without friction. “If you do not get these basics right, you could implement millions of features while seeing little impact,” he tells EGR. The privately owned firm regularly discusses customer needs to influence product priorities, with further changes to UX and journeys planned for 2024.

Another top 10 player in EKG’s UK study was BVGroup’s BetVictor in sixth place, with a total score of 16.1, and seventh for UX.  The in-house-developed tech was described by EKG “as a slick-feeling app” that would have broken into the top five for UX if it handled login credentials better. It was also flagged as having no biometric option available to most testers as well as an old-style bet builder with bad UX, according to EKG. Generally, though, testers found the app to be fast, simple to navigate and easy to find and place bets.

With customers often encountering challenges around payments and onboarding when using sports betting apps, BVGroup has streamlined payment processes and is continually enhancing onboarding experiences. BVGroup’s director of B2B and product experience, Max Konrad, shares a change that was implemented as a direct result of discussions between its customer experience and product design teams on optimisation opportunities. “During this process, we identified line changes in American sports as a significant pain point for our customers. In response, we developed an innovative auto-accept line change feature within our platform,” he explains.

On the lookout   

As to determining what good UX should look like, Wilson breaks it down into two types of bettors: those who know what they want to bet on and those wanting to be inspired through window shopping. For the first cohort, signposting is key, so how easy it is to find a market and chosen selection, and how many clicks it takes to strike the bet. Wilson singles out bet365 as the only operator achieving this currently.

In addition, he believes intuitive UX is needed as well as active or passive personalisation. For active personalisation, he refers to Casumo’s sportsbook where in the past a user was able to move certain navigation icons around themselves. “I don’t think it took off, but I think that’s more because they’re not a sportsbook brand and they just didn’t invest enough in it properly,” Wilson remarks. In terms of passive personalisation, he shares the following example: “If I had the ability to configure my lobby for bet365, I would probably store American football, pick Tottenham as my team, and so on and so forth. No one’s doing that,” he adds.

For the second type of “window shopping” bettor, it’s about ensuring there’s a clear and compelling upsell betting offer on the screen. Again, he lauds bet365 as the only operator to offer this. “If I launch a very well-known betting app today, you don’t see a bet on the home screen. You have to scroll, and I think that’s just bizarre. And if you click into an event, then the promotions you see aren’t linked to that event.”

Meanwhile, Howard’s biggest bugbear is not being able to move swiftly through an app and find what you’re looking for. This is where a search function can play an important role, however he points
out that if you have nailed personalisation, the search function becomes redundant anyway.

On the topic of lacking a search function, Wilson is of the opinion that people don’t really use search bars as “there’s no muscle memory there within sports betting”. Instead, his recommendation for a customer that likes American football is to make sure it is the most accessible sport for them to get to. “Having smart lobbies is really the only way to approach it but it’s not really done anywhere, not even on bet365. Bet365 does store my last or recently used sports but in the side navigation, not the lobby,” he points out.

For former Betfred USA COO Bryan Bennett, who now runs his own consultancy, NorthCo Strategy, it’s as simple as making it easy to find promotions, bonuses and those hard-to-find sports. “There are several books that make it taxing to get to EFL League Two, for instance, and bury it behind too many clicks. A good UX provides 90%+ of what you want to see in two to three clicks.”

Take a swipe

While it has been tried before, as Wilson of swipe-to-bet Bookee fame can attest to, last November LeoVegas Group’s director of sports strategy, Per Carlander, likewise shared his views on how sports betting should be more like Tinder. So far Bookee, which launched in November 2016 but ceased operations in September 2019 when its platform supplier’s UK licence was revoked, has been the only operator to experiment with a Tinder-style format user interface (UI). Each bet in Bookee was individually selected and curated by its team into ‘decks’ (such as Man United versus Arsenal this weekend). A user would enter a deck and opt to swipe left to decline a suggested bet or right to place it.

Wilson cites FanDuel as getting pretty close to offering that type of feature, as well as BetVictor and Unibet for using ‘mini cards’ promoting the bets of the day on their home screens. However, he argues that these are features rather than standalone products. “If someone like Betr in the US comes out and says, ‘We’re only going to have TikTok for gambling’, I just don’t think it will work because you won’t attract the scale you need to make a sportsbook successful. But if you have it as a feature, where you can go into TikTok or Tinder mode, you give users the option to do both.”

In Carlander’s aforementioned views, the LeoVegas exec acknowledged that adopting a completely different style of experience like TikTok or Tinder might not necessarily go down well with bettors and could risk alienating your audience. Instead, he suggested running an alternative version alongside the existing one. “I liked that – there’s no point in being flashy if people hate it,” says Williams. “I agree with the use of beta test groups, getting customer feedback and understanding your audience rather than spending a lot of money and resources on something that might work for TikTok but may not be adopted by a betting audience.”

Bennett sees the potential for a stripped-down sportsbook but is yet to be convinced that this will become the standard anytime soon. He adds: “There’s a case to be made that the next big wave of customer acquisition is going to be targeted at the novice bettors who may be more open to a super-simple, Tinder-style UI. That type of UX or UI is probably more appropriate for micro-betting, where having fewer potentially curated options make the product better.”

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Personalisation is also a hugely important aspect of UX but one that has yet to be fully executed effectively in sports betting, unlike Amazon, Netflix or Spotify.

Being able to present customers with an individually customised sportsbook through personalisation is a huge undertaking and still a pipedream. Howard says he can only see that becoming a reality for a company that owns its own tech. “That’s huge amounts of data. It’s a completely different front-end for every customer, and you’d need to have a really modern scalable infrastructure behind the scenes.”

With regard to innovation, there’s limited scope for sports betting operators to think outside the box due to the risk involved. “If you’re an existing sportsbook, you can’t rip up the rulebook,” says Wilson. “So, you create a copycat ecosystem where you wait for a competitor to build a product like a bet builder or a ‘Group Bet’ like Sky Bet did. If it works, you copy it like a bet builder, but if it doesn’t, such as ‘Group Bet’, you don’t.”

Despite it now being defunct, social sports betting operator BetBull is applauded by both Howard and Wilson for taking a radical approach and gamifying the experience, with a special mention also going to kwiff, which built its own platform and features the unique supercharged ‘You’ve been kwiffed’ offering.

Having the money to invest in reinventing the wheel is also holding back innovation, especially for challenger brands looking to raise funds as investors are more focused on profits than revenue and user numbers. Wilson states: “There just simply isn’t enough incentive for people to go out there and innovate. I think that’s why we’ve got so much stagnation.”

Over in the US, some firms have been trying out innovative approaches to product design but it’s still early days to gauge the level of success. “Larger operators are experimenting with infinite scroll, merchandise cross-selling, social feeds and integrated streaming,” outlines Sharp Alpha Advisors’ Danzig.

With the industry in the US being roughly five years old, Bennett notes the sector is only just getting started in the realms of innovation. That said, he does give a nod to FanDuel for ushering in the SGP craze and Fanatics for its FanCash rewards programme, where a sportsbook customer receives FanCash on every bet to spend on a bonus bet or to buy sportswear merchandise through Fanatics Betting and Gaming’s parent company.

To sum it up, good UX means making it easy for punters to find the bet they are looking for, displaying the information in a visually stimulating manner, ensuring an app is fast and secure as well as personalising the product to specific customer needs. While the risks attached to innovation may be holding some operators back from thinking outside the box, it could be time for someone to follow in the footsteps of Bookee and BetBull with a fresh approach to sports betting.