Gambling.com is a comparison site for online gambling services and recently launched in the United States. Though, due to varying online gambling legislations in every state, it was very important that the user experience needed to cater for when online gambling is legal in your state vs. online gambling is not legal in your state.

Since geo-location has a 15% margin of error on mobile and Gambling.com’s traffic is majority mobile, we wanted to create an experience where a user is given accurate information and therefore allowing them to consume genuine information. The main challenge was finding the right users.

A large amount of quantitative data existed in the company because of previous AB tests and insights from Google Analytics. We roughly knew the demographic of site visitors and an assumption of their behavior. We had an idea of how they were interacting with the site already because of Hotjar, but what was lacking was the qualitative data from actual users.

Since gambling can be a sensitive topic and since we are in Ireland, we chose Usertesting.com as an avenue to test potential users. With a specific screener question and using our top demographic (males from ages 25-44), we were able to test specifically in states where gambling was legal and not legal to gather insights.

It was important that after every test, I record/transcribe the results into a Confluence page. It allowed the business to see the value of user testing by reading all of the user feedback. It also kept our project organized with every design decision made. It was easy to summarize our data in the end when all of it was collected from the beginning. For example, if 4/5 users were able to select their state successfully, then we would prioritze other features as this part of the journey was sufficient.

For once, time was on our side and so we were able to iterate, test again, iterate, and test again. One of the iterations involved coming up with different concepts for the header. To our surprise, the one with the more visually heavy header did not pass our user tests as users were less likely to read the copy when it was on a dark background.

The new improved UX for the United States officially launched in mid-August so we are still waiting on the data, but we hope that this will improve a user’s journey to finding deals pertaining to their state so they can continue to play safe and legally.

💡Some final thoughts on Usertesting.com
Downside of remote testing is that many participants get tested so frequently that they’ve learned to focus on certain aspects of a design. To compensate for possible “professional” testers, you’ll need to analyze the test sessions (for example, by watching the video recordings), and exclude results from people who don’t seem to provide genuine feedback.

Regardless of this, I think it’s important to always prioritize your findings. Fix the most important problems first, and then test again. However, if that’s impossible (for example, if the problems are too big to tackle), prioritize problems according to their impact on the business.

Finally, I found that it’s important to involve the whole product team in the testing process. Having an opportunity to observe users will help the whole team understand the problems with usability and to empathize with users. Testing enables you to build shared understanding, even before the team starts designing.

Thanks for reading!