Project Details
Background
Racing is by far the most popular type of sports betting in Australia, with about 75% of all bets being placed on either Horse, Harness, or Greyhound races.
The existing racing journey had a number of UX issues which meant that the company was losing out on a lot of revenue, and causing both new and returning visitors to leave the site without transacting.
Project Highlights
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17% bounce rate reduction
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11% engagement increase (pages / session)
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SEO ranking up from #8 to #3, and #13 to #9 on top search terms
Project goal
The goal of this project was to redesign the racing journey in time for the Australian Spring horse racing season, when traffic was expected to peak.
There are 3 main types of racing:
- Horse
- Greyhound
- Harness
The redesign needed to work for all 3 types of racing, and with 80% of traffic coming from mobile devices, had to be mobile first. Another key requirement was providing easy inter-category navigation. Although horse racing is by far the most popular type of racing, racing bettors do tend to dabble between categories.
Initial Research
Racing bettors tend to use a lot of statistics to inform their bets. Information such as the condition of the track, horses bloodline, and performance history are all commonly used data points for choosing the right horse to bet on.
I spent the first week of the project gathering requirements from stakeholders. Information such as what the site architecture should be for optimal SEO performance, or what commercial advertising spaces would be required, helped me to progress the design.
I also used my time to understand racing terminologies and browse competitors to understand the industry standards and common patterns in interface design.
Design development
One of the challenges of this project was collaborating with my team who were based in Australia, while I was in London’s headquarters. We had a few calls per week to present back designs and answer questions. Most designs were presented as prototypes and a spoken ‘guided tour’ over Skype.
I also presented the final designs to 60+ people at a Friday company update. It felt great to know that the new journey would make such a difference compared to the old one!
User testing
I conducted remote user testing on 3 iterations of the design to ensure the end product was as intuitive as possible. The final design scored 91 out of 100 on the website usability scale.