Why does UX still hinder conversion?

Your favourite gambling app has sent you a notification for a great new offer, so of course you click it. You wouldn’t want to miss out on the latest chance to win some cash, would you?

But it’s rarely as simple as that, as generally, you’re not taken straight to that tasty offer. You’re taken to the app’s generic landing page, and then it’s your job to wade through the swamp of other offers and pop ups to find the offer that brought you there in the first place.

Jurnii CEO Fraser Dunk echoes Mark’s words, using the offer click example as a tangible piece of friction that players and suppliers face every day.

From the start of that player’s journey, there is a clear mismatch between the advertised experience and the actual journey.

The question is this, then: After so many years of constant optimisation, why do these issues still exist?

Every team succeeds, but the player still leaves

A player sees one brand. Behind it, however, acquisition, product, compliance and payments teams may each be working towards different targets. Every department can hit its numbers while the journey between them still loses customers.

“Five green dashboards, one red funnel,” is how Mark Hald describes the disconnect. “No one owns the entire door because compliance will have KYC, you know, your customer. Payments will have deposits, product will have the form, and then each optimises its own square.”

For James Watson, product lead at kwiff, the challenge is familiar in the UK market. Even a small change to a deposit journey can require input from payments, compliance, risk, marketing and CRM, alongside changes to the technology underpinning those processes.

“That organisational challenge, the human challenge of that is probably the biggest one, because who owns the decision becomes really fragmented,” he says.

On the customer side of things, there’s likely little interest in these responsibilities and how they’re divided. If a withdrawal is delayed, they’re not sitting there wondering about internal processes, they want an answer as soon as possible. Being passed between teams only exposes the internal complexity they expect the operator to manage.

“The reality is, players don’t see departments,” says Dunk.

His proposed response is to bring those departments together around the experience they collectively deliver. A cross-functional team involving product, marketing and operations can account for each area’s requirements while designing the journey as a whole.

That does not mean one department can make every decision. It means the people responsible for different steps need to understand how their choices affect the next one. A shorter registration form, for example, achieves little if it simply moves confusion and abandonment further along the journey.

For operators, the question is therefore whether departmental improvements make the overall experience better. Getting a player through one stage matters less if the next gives them a reason to leave.

Conversion losses do not end at the first deposit

Conversion losses are possible at all stages of a customer journey, with Dunk describing the difference between what he calls soft losses and hard losses.

Hard losses, he explains, take place around visible milestones such as registration, deposits or withdrawals. Soft losses are likely to arise through repeated difficulties when trying to find content, navigating sites, managing an account or simply understanding what to do next.

“But it’s those softer losses that are often overlooked because they’re almost invisible,” says Dunk.

The sheer volume of content on modern betting platforms is obviously a selling point, but it can ultimately prove to be an issue. More choice can make a product more confusing to use, especially if your interface offers no clear instructions to help players understand. Dunk used deposit pages as an example of this, as players might be faced with 15 payment options, without a clear explanation of processing fees or processing times.

In the UK market, Watson describes a similar issue with sportsbook pages, where years upon years of new additions have made the pure betting experience far more complicated to navigate.

“It’s a bit of a Frankenstein of all the various different things that have been added over the last 10, 20, 30 years even,” he says.

The desired betting journey is very simple. Find the relevant event, understand what you’re betting on, construct that bet, and then place it. Unfortunately this journey has been slowly complicated by each additional feature, and that simple journey is now needlessly difficult to complete.

Watson is quick to admit that kwiff is not immune to being drawn into the pursuit of feature depth, but claims the business is doing what it can to step back and reassess.

“Let’s just not think and obsess about all the things we’re adding. Let’s instead obsess about simple things. Do the simple things really well and the end result should be a better experience for all,” he says.

The consequence of overlooking the basics is likely to appear in retention rather than initial conversion. It’s one thing to acquire a customer, but if everyday use is made too difficult, they’ll likely take their next visit somewhere else.

Regulation creates friction, but design determines the experience

There are many steps that players understandably find frustrating, but they exist for important reasons. Regulations mean that verification and other compliance checks cannot simply be designed away. As a result of this, difficult decisions need to be made regarding how a betting experience should work.

For Hald, the industry sometimes underestimates the distinction, treating a problem involving regulation, technology and multiple departments as something a better interface alone can solve.

“A large chunk of these steps are regulatory requirements, not user experience decisions,” he says. “So we can polish how they feel, but we can’t delete them.”

It’s important to note that these regulations aren’t an excuse for poor UX, however. Hald highlights form length, errors in wording and the way documents are requested as opportunities for businesses to put their best foot forward. The challenge, he says, is recognising which constraints are imposed and which are self-imposed by the operators themselves.

He highlights Germany as an example of this, as operators working in the same regulatory framework are still able to take a different approach when explaining these requirements and anticipating potential issues. Those differences show that a mandated step does not dictate every aspect of its design.

Better internal collaboration can help

For the UK, Watson argues that bringing product, compliance and risk teams together can help smooth out these issues.

Treating compliance as a blocker to commercial performance risks overlooking their shared interest in a successful, compliant customer experience.

“Tell them why it’s happening, tell them what’s happening, keep them updated and explain everything in a very transparent and simple English way and you help remove a lot of those barriers straight away,” he says.

Watson also shares his desire for closer collaboration between operators and the regulators when these requirements are being developed, to ensure the practicalities of meeting them can be considered at an earlier stage.

With all this in mind, it’s clear that work can be done to optimise player experience, even when strict regulations are in place. Yes, a player may need to complete a check, but it must be made clear why, and how to proceed. Clearer instructions, realistic expectations and useful support can stop a necessary step becoming a difficult experience.

Knowing where players leave is not knowing why

Knowing where a player abandoned a registration or betting journey is one thing, but actually understanding why they left is the true challenge. Confusing instructions, unappealing offers or an unexpected delay will likely cause the same result on a dashboard, but each issue requires a different response.

“Funnel data is an autopsy,” says Dunk. It records what happened, while qualitative research can help explain why and identify problems before more players encounter them.

The funnel is also likely to make assumptions about a player’s behaviour. Players rarely move neatly from one page to the next. They pause, they return to earlier pages or maybe even use another device entirely. What looks from the outside like abandonment could simply be a journey that was postponed.

Hald explains that incomplete visibility adds a further complication. He argues operators need to be careful about claiming certainty when their data only captures a small part of the overall experience. He says you must compare different customer groups, examine support tickets and review sessions to help build a more convincing explanation than any single metric could provide.

Watson explains kwiff similarly sees behavioural data as the starting point for investigation. It can identify where customers disappear, but understanding their reasons requires experimentation and direct feedback.

Similar levels of scrutiny also need to apply when a change appears to have been successful. Dunk puts forward the example of simplifying initial registration while leaving more significant verification steps until a later stage. The registration might improve, but you might have just moved the issue along, rather than actually doing anything to solve it, and therefore abandonment or other issues may increase.

“You can’t just optimise one part of a flow and a funnel,” he says.

For operators, measuring improvement therefore means looking beyond the step being changed. A higher completion rate is useful, but its value depends on what happens next and whether the overall experience has become easier to navigate.

Europe cannot share one customer journey

Being able to understand why players struggle also means understanding that the same journey will not work across every market in Europe. Language is of course a significant challenge in itself, but simply translating a platform into another language rarely makes it feel natural to the people using it.

“I hate localisation strategies, which are simply translations. It completely loses the nuance of that local market,” says Dunk.

He points at error messages or calls to action that have been translated without taking into account local expressions or cultural norms. Words can change, but that doesn’t mean the instructions for the player actually make sense in that market.

This doesn’t mean a platform needs to be completely rebuilt for every jurisdiction, as some elements will of course work across different markets. The challenge therefore is identifying which local expectations might require a different approach, while also understanding that audiences might be different, even within the same country.

Device and context matter too. For Hald, operators can misunderstand mobile behaviour when they treat it as a smaller version of desktop use.

“It’s not a mini desktop,” he says.

Hald described a player using one hand, perhaps dividing their attention between various screens and moving between other apps. A journey designed around a player’s uninterrupted concentration can be difficult when someone is repeatedly putting their device down and returning to it later.

That connects with Dunk’s warning about interpreting interrupted journeys as abandonment. Operators need to understand the circumstances in which a product is being used before deciding what good performance looks like.

Using familiar payment options, wording instructions clearly or being able to accommodate journey interruptions can make a huge difference to how comfortable a player feels. As such, localisation must extend into the practical experience of using a product, with research into different expectations and design shortfalls being of paramount importance.

Fix the moments that make players lose trust

Opportunities to improve UX can be found in everyday interactions. A registration field which explains requirements before someone starts typing can prevent unnecessary errors. A helpful message after a payment error can help resolve an issue without the process having to restart.

Dunk explains that he sees these basics being overlooked all the time.

“They accept characters that they’re not allowed to input and then tell them they’re not allowed to input them,” he says.

Dunk continues by saying that an error response must explain the reason, provide a route to recovery and ultimately offer access to support. Completely wiping a registration form or displaying an unexplained error can leave a player confused and far more likely to abandon.

The need for extra clarity also extends to withdrawals, an area of the journey where a small issue can lead to significant damage to player trust. Dunk questions why information around deposits is not consistently matched when customers are looking to withdraw.

“Withdrawal, you have to wait X hours, X days, you don’t know the status of your withdrawal,” he says.

Deposits and withdrawals may involve different checks and processing requirements, but players still need clear expectations about what will happen and when.

For the UK, Watson describes the confusion that takes place when a withdrawal is unexpectedly held for review. The customer will contact support asking where their money is, and may be worried that they’re suspected of wrongdoing.

“They don’t care which part of the pipeline it’s stuck in or what extra checks need to happen,” he explains.

The operator needs to turn that internal process into an understandable update, explaining what it can and making the next steps clear.

Changes like these aren’t as flashy as a new feature or product launch, but they’re arguably far more important to a customer. Preventing avoidable errors, helping a customer recover funds, or being able to clearly explain a delay can make a potentially frustrating experience far easier to navigate.

Deliver on promises to your players

The player who clicked that offer at the start of this article was never asking for much: to find what they were promised and understand what to do next. Delivering that consistently requires teams to take responsibility for the whole journey, including the less glamorous moments when something goes wrong. Until those basics work, the next feature or promotion risks becoming another invitation to an experience that fails to deliver.

Andrew Datson

Despite being new to iGaming, Andrew has been writing all his professional life, including for The Sporting News, Fanda Ltd and WrestleTalk. He doesn't appear to be planning to stop any time soon.

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