Today most gaming portals offer bingo, casino, games, poker and a sportsbook. Is this the best way? Look at Full Tilt Poker, PokerStars and PartyGaming who promote brands for one kind of game.
For instance players go to PokerStars to play poker, but when you go to for instance bwin, Unibet, Ladbrokes and many more gaming portals it is difficult to know what the player want to play.
Almost all gaming portals offering many different games have a start page where they show their different offerings where the player have to make a choice …

In May I will run a workshop around gaming portals of the future. It will be a very hands on day where you will learn new tools to be able to build better portals.
The workshop will include sections about

User Experience & Agile Development
Prototyping the User Experience
Personalisation: Gaming Portals 2.0
Social Media: Gaming Portals 3.0

More details will be available in the coming weeks. You can sign up here to be notified when the details are ready.
If you have any questions or suggestions for the workshop then don’t hesitate to contact me, staffan.schroder@inuse.se
/Staffan

Today Svenska Spel launched an iPhone app where you can get results from matches and events.
It is interesting and exciting to see that Svenska Spel are among the first operators to develop an iPhone app. You can see your current bets, but you can’t place any bets (probably because Apple wouldn’t allow it).
I’ll use the app for  few days and then write a review.
/Staffan

I wrote about bingo back in the beginning of december, Why do all bingo clients look the same? Where are the innovations?, but there are a few companies doing some innovations.
We have seen Live Casinos (where you play online against a real dealer) for a while and now it is showing up in bingo clients as well. One company doing this is Atac Media.
I think having a real person calling out the numbers will be more fun. The problem is that I couldn’t try it out. The bingo opens at …

I wrote a blog post back in October, Show Folded Cards - Great feature implemented differently, where I looked at PokerStars and Full Tilt and how differently they had implemented their Show Folded Cards feature.
Today when I played on Full Tilt I noticed that they had changed their implementation. Now it works like it should, showing the player his cards when he moves the mouse over his position. Good job Full Tilt!
As I wrote back in October, it isn’t always enough to have all the functionality, you also need to …

Gaming VC, an online gaming company with brands like Casino Club, Poker Kings and Betaland, said they will invest up to €7 million during 2010 to build the new businesses.
The have hired former PartyGaming marketing chief Jon Salmon and former Sportingbet head of sportsbook Jim Humberstone for the expansion.
It will be interesting to see if they will use some of the funds to design a great player experience around their offering or if everything will go towards marketing costs.
I believe focusing on the player experience and find ways that will let the …

This year’s International Gaming Expo (IGE), incorporating ICEi, is over and I’m back home. My reflections from the expo are mixed.
Most positive: I was impressed by Net Entertainment and  Betsoft’s games. The quality in their games is really good. It is especially interesting to see that Betsoft incorporate their controls as a part of the game.
Most negative: The Innovative Showcase (it was a new addition addition to IGE 2010 that gave exhibitors the opportunity to present to IGE visitors) was a major dissapointment! Many of the presenters didn’t even show up for their presentations, …

I wrote a blog post, Betsson can make it easier for their poker players. Here is a suggestion!, giving Betsson a design advice back in September (read the post here).  And today when I played on Betsson I saw that Betsson had redesigned their poker section on Betsson.com and the solution I suggested is implemented.
My design advice back in September was “Today when you click on the “Play in the browser” button on the poker start page you don’t start the poker client, insted you come to a page with …

Rush Poker is a new poker game just released at Full Tilt Poker; this is a new and completely different way to play poker and probably one of the most innovative things to happen to poker in many years.
The idea of Rush Poker is extremely easy, insted of playing at one table you join a pool of players playing at many tables. When you are finished playing the hand you are moved to another table where a new hand is begins right away. You don’t even have to wait until …

It really doesn’t matter to which operator in online gaming you play with today. Gaming portals are very similar when it comes to everything from available games, user flows to registration and deposits. Bingo clients almost look identical from one provider to another. Why is that? Are software providers afraid to differentiate themselves by innovation?
I think that winners in the industry the next couple of years will be operators and software providers that put a lot of focus on the player experience. This is because you can have a really …