Company
BetDEX Labs
Duration
2 Years
Role
Lead Product Designer
Scope of work
Responsive Web
Leadership
Stakeholder management
Strategic thinking
UX Research
About
Sports betting is a colossal industry, with global handle estimated to exceed $1 trillion each year. Despite this, the sector has long been plagued by inefficiencies and consumer frustrations. Bookmakers often saddle customers with high costs—with fees often surpassing 5% for a single bet—whilst providing products that all have a glaring lack of innovation.
In 2021, BetDEX embarked on a mission to revolutionise this stagnant landscape following a significant $21 million seed funding round. BetDEX’s goal was simple yet ambitious: to establish itself as the world's global clearinghouse for sports betting by leveraging the disruptive potential of web3 technology.
By open-sourcing infrastructure and decentralising the protocol, BetDEX places the control directly in the hands of those who build and use the platform. This approach is not just about creating a more efficient betting platform; it's about fostering a movement. BetDEX is dedicated to empowering users to engage in successful wagering with one another on a platform they have a real stake in and genuinely care about.
Challenges
Establishing efficient processes to manage product development while ensuring a healthy work-life balance for the team. This meant balancing the need for speed with the desire to maintain high product quality, which required a careful balance of design and development demands.
Implementing Know Your Customer (KYC) sign up processes, which proved to be a significant barrier for users in the web3 space who traditionally prefer to remain anonymous.
Despite the initial enthusiasm and following a successful beta launch, growth started to plateau, and user engagement began to wane. With the core features of the product now established, meaning a strategic reassessment was necessary to realign goals and plans for future growth
Acquiring a full gaming license, which required navigating complex regulatory frameworks and ensuring compliance with local laws
Key Results
Scaling trade volume since leaving beta, BetDEX has successfully scaled to handling over 8.5m trades on the exchange
Consistent stake and handle growth ~$500k in avg. monthly handle, with an increasing weekly avg. customer stake of $1k
Product offering growth since launch, BetDEX now fully licensed and caters to users in 100+ countries
STARTING FROM SCRATCH
As one of the founding designers at BetDEX, we were essentially presented with a blank canvas. My initial steps were twofold: first to collaborate with the product manager to devise a simple strategic direction, and secondly defining the visual branding and UI.
The strategic plan was simple to prioritise the basic yet essential flows known as the betting 'fundamentals'.
EARLY PROTO PERSONA PLANNING WITH THE TEAM
UX Research
Frequent testing was a major part of the process throughout the project, and also one of it’s key challenges. In the projects early stages, because we were designing without an already established user base we utilised a third party platform called Prolific, to provide us with a panel of users based on a series of criteria relating to sports betting and web3 experience, that we then used to form user personas and run prototype testing sessions utilising Maze.
Given the nature of BetDEX as a startup, and only having 2 product designers on the project to start, it also meant we investigated significant time establishing our research processes to ensure we were making as informed decisions as possible, while doing our best to avoid bias as a result of the team’s industry experience. As the project progressed and we moved from a Beta to MVP launch, we slowly transitioned to interviewing and testing with real users to better inform our research efforts.
Using canny.io for alpha feedback
Ideation workshop exercises
DESIGN
Time spent working on similar applications previously in my career was invaluable from the very beginning of the project, similarly I was also fortunate enough to be working alongside a stellar team, many of whom I had worked with previously. This allowed us to pick things up from where we left off in the past from a process perspective, and get moving quickly.
However, while I had experience in the sportsbook world, designing a peer-to-peer exchange meant a whole other level of complexity on top of what I was used to, and proved to be a fundamental challenge throughout the design of the project.
Another key challenge for the team was designing a product built on web3 technologies, namely the Solana blockchain. While this brought with it many big advantages such as rapid transaction times, transparency, and non-custodial wallets, many of which were fundamental to our value proposition, it also led to a lot of key constraints such as sign up and KYC, rendering data from the blockchain, and licensing which informed a lot of design decisions and directions we had to take.
Initially, the team identified the core functionalities of the app and addressed them through a series of iterative workshops, low-fidelity design work, and rapid testing to validate decisions. By breaking down the app's functionality into manageable pieces and testing each element individually, the team was able to make informed design decisions in what was largely a unique product proposition.
Early design validation via maze and prolific
Iteration
With the roadmap and strategy firmly in place, it was the design team's turn to bring those ideas to life.
An initial analysis of the current product’s user flows and a review of our competitors' offerings were undertaken to identify existing and potential pain points. This analysis enabled us to establish a clear understanding of the current situation, paving the way for the development of new, more efficient user flows. These were visualised through flow diagrams, which proved invaluable for soliciting early feedback from stakeholders and developers before moving into the design phase.
Thanks to our DUX design system, various design directions could be explored quickly. The proactive sharing of designs and liberal use of the commenting system on our platforms facilitated a dynamic environment where ideas could rapidly materialise.
Once a promising design direction was identified, it was quickly prototyped using Figma and moved to user testing. This iterative process of gathering feedback and re-testing allowed us to refine our designs based on direct input from real users, ensuring our solutions were both effective and user-friendly.
Competitor analysis and strategy planning
Outcome
Since launching in 2022, the platform has handled over $8m in transactions (Q1 2024), with no indications of deceleration. However, the forthcoming phase of BetDEX's evolution involves the transition out of beta.
Whilst not all features have been released as of the time of writing, there is much excitement over the introduction of the BetDEX wallet, markedly simplifying the technical and user experience challenges previously encountered with non-custodial and web3 wallet technologies. This innovation should drastically reduce signup times and improve completion rates, alongside introducing more conventional methods for deposits and withdrawals through fiat gateways.
Final screen examples