BetAnything

BetAnything

Taking a sportsbook in-house

BetAnything is an online sportsbook whose product had been designed by an external agency. Over nine months, I helped the company's new in-house UX team take ownership of the platform and relaunch it. On launch day, average engagement time was nearly three times the pre-launch baseline.

Role
Senior UX/UI Designer
Client
BetAnything
Sector
Sports betting
Year
2024

Overview

BetAnything's product strategy had been defined entirely by an agency. When the company formed its own UX team, the goal was to move the platform to an experience it owned and could keep evolving, without depending on outside direction.

Challenge

We inherited a complex betting platform with inconsistent interfaces, unclear ownership and almost no documentation. Nobody inside the company had a map of how it worked or why it was built that way, so every new request started from zero and delivery was slow. Engineering had inherited the same gaps, which meant many decisions had to be argued from scratch.

Approach

With no internal history to rely on, we started with a competitive audit of other sportsbooks on mobile and desktop, focused on navigation, interaction and usability. The same weaknesses showed up across competitors: journeys that changed between devices, cluttered homepages that slowed down finding information, and limited search. Several of them applied to BetAnything too.

I worked across every phase, from wireframes to usability testing, and we replaced handoffs with workshops and design reviews alongside product, engineering and content.

The competitive audit, from the whole wall down to four slides.
Research findings on desktop
Audit findings on desktop.
Research findings on mobile
Audit findings on mobile.
Site map
The site map behind the new information architecture.
Information architecture for the personalized home
The information architecture for the personalized home.
The team sketching wireframes, and the low fidelity wireframes on paper
Working sessions with the team, and the paper wireframes.

Key decisions

Structure before screens.

We rebuilt the information architecture from the audit before any visual redesign. Redesigning screens on top of an undocumented structure would have carried the same problems into the new platform.

Controls where users expect them.

On mobile, we moved the burger menu to the top right and the chat button to the right side, where users are used to finding them on other sites. We also enlarged the primary CTAs in each banner so the main action was easier to spot and tap.

One design system for every area.

We evolved the design system so every product area pulled from the same components and rules. It addressed the inconsistency left from the agency era and gave engineering one reference instead of one-off specs.

The BetAnything design system cover
The design system, the foundation for the whole suite.
The applied color palette, as tokens for developers
The applied color palette, mapped to tokens for developers.
The typographic scale in Aeonik Pro
The type scale, set in Aeonik Pro.
The icon palette, grouped by category
The icon system, grouped into categories.
The accordion component with its anatomy and usage guidelines
An accordion component, with its anatomy and usage guidelines.
Alerts and toasts with their anatomy and usage guidelines
Alerts and toasts, documented the same way.
The platform after the redesignThe platform before the redesignBeforeAfter

Outcome

The platform relaunched on July 29. On launch day, active users rose to 13K from 9.6K the day before. New users reached 26K. Average engagement time hit 6m 07s, nearly triple the pre-launch baseline.

Through the first week, daily active users held between 9.7K and 10K. After the relaunch, players averaged 250 bets per month. Lifetime value reached $400 per player. Inside the company, UX moved from executing an agency's strategy to owning it.

Active users
13K
Up from 9.6K the day before
New users
26K
In a single day
Average engagement time
6:07
Nearly 3x the pre-launch baseline

Launch day, July 29

What I learned

  1. 01The hardest part was getting stakeholders on board and aligning with engineering, since neither team had the full picture of the platform.
  2. 02Since then, I document decisions as I make them so the next person doesn't have to reconstruct them. I also bring more than one version of a solution to reviews, which gives stakeholders something concrete to compare.
  3. 03If I started again, I would run usability tests earlier and start documenting on day one.

Due to confidentiality agreements, certain details have been modified or omitted.