It is important to help your players complete their goals. In the image above you see how 4 different poker sites, Partypoker, PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Unibet (Microgaming), and their implementation of the Buy-in dialogue.
When a poker player sits down he needs to bring money to the table. How much he can bring in depends on his bankroll and the table limits.
In all the examples above you see that they have done a couple of different implementations to the same functionality.
You should base your design on stats!
You could …

I wrote a blog post, Unibet should optimize their screen real estate, giving Unibet a design advice back in August (read the post here). And today when I played on Unibet I noticed that they had implemented the solution I wrote about.
My design advice back in August was “…Since they know I’ve completed steps 1 and 2 Unibet also knows that my main player goal is to start the instant poker client. I would actually skip the page all together and just start the poker client when the player click on the “Play without download” …

Gaming portals should have a global language library (for each language) where all terms used are stored.
Consistency is a big part of the player experience. Things should behave similar and they should also use the same terminology, especially on the same gaming portal.
In the image above you see an example where it isn’t very consistent. The example is taken from paddypower.com (there are many sites with the same problem) where different names are used for the same thing, even on the same page.
To register at paddypower.com they use the following …

People like to be around other people for many different reasons, for instance be part of a group or be recognised for their skills.
Playing on a multiplayer slots you either play against or with other players.
The design of the slot needs to be very different if it is a slot where you play WITH or AGAINST other players.
Building communities around multiplayer games where you play together will be a big part of the future gaming portals. Just look at Zynga and all their different games on Facebook and other platforms. They …

Image 1. 8 steps to start playing Black Jack.
This week’s redesign is just one quick and fast design implementation to Betsafe’s gaming portal.
My design advice to Betsafe is, Let players stay on the same page after logging in!
Today players are redirected back to the start page when they log in . In image 1 you see the steps for a player going to a Black Jack game without signing in. Then the player signs in and is redirected back to the start page and have to find the game again. …

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/Staffan

Betsafe’s sign up form
When I created an account with Betsafe (Betsafe’s casino page will be next week’s redesign) I noticed something a little bit confusing.
In the image above you can see the Password input field which is mandatory. And below is the the field where you should retype the password. Isn’t that field mandatory? It actually is, but looks like it isn’t!
I see the “Password” and “Retype password” fields as two seperate ones and “Retype password” should also be in bold and have the asterics showing that it is mandatory.
/Staffan

I believe that social fatures and personalized content will play a very big part in for the gaming experience in the next couple of years.
Today many instant games just opens up in a new window when you play them with no content around it. To make the gaming experience much better we need to add relevant content.
In my concept design above (done for a presentation a year ago) every game has its own “game home” where there are relevant content on the page. The game can be played within the …

Paf’s start page
Paf has a gaming portal which offers all kinds of gaming, but they don’t really use their start page to its real potential. A start page needs to attract players and give them reasons for staying, I think Paf really miss that.
On Paf’s start page they just have navigation items and a few banners.
As you can see they top navigation is: “Home”, “Slots”, “Bingo & Lotteries”, “Casino”, “Dice & Backgammon”, “Poker”, “Betting” and “Skill”.
Below there is a banner “Red dog bonus”, which is also in two places in …

Last night when I played poker on PokerStars I incidentaly hit the “Fold” button when I was going going to “Check”. When I did I got an alert window saying “Checking is free. Are you sure you want to fold?” and then there was two buttons “Check” and “Fold”.
I think there are two things that could be improved here, first the main “Fold” and “Check” buttons at the bottom are “Fold” to the left and “Check” to the right but in the alert window they are the opposite “Check” and …

I wrote a blog post giving PokerStars a design advice back in September (read the post here). And today when I played at PokerStars I noticed that they had implemented the solution I wrote about.

PokerStars chat window back in September

PokerStars chat window today
My design advice back in September was “A much better solution would be to let the player just click on the text in the chat window or the “banner” to open up the tournament’s lobby where I can register.” and that is how it works today! Good job PokerStars!
/Staffan

mr Green won the prize as the best gambling site last night at Internetworld’s Top 100 Award Cermony (link in Swedish). In the overall list mr Green came in the 6th place, congratulations to everyone at mr Green!
A part of Internetworld’s motivation read:
“Mr. Green is the style and remains the most exciting gaming site. The vibrant graphics and the unique, social functions, based on this site makes us really eager to play! ….. It’s fun (and rare) with a transparent casino where the team behind the brand are visible. And the …

William Hill’s start page today.
It is harder than it needs to be to place a bet at William Hill. I believe this is because the layout of is not focused on the player’s goals. The goals for a player is likely to find bets and place bets.
The design is very clean and looks good but I believe the problem is in the placement of the navigation (under Sports). With William Hill’s navigation structure at the top the player has to scroll down to be able to see matches and odds. I …

This week’s redesign is on a small detail on Full Tilt Poker’s client. Full Tilt Poker really has a great poker client and I often play on it, but one little thing kept buggin me yesterday when I played. That was the advance action checkboxes which let you make actions before it is your turn.
Below you can read about “my problem” and my redesign.
Today

As you can see from the animation the checkbox and buttons aren’t in the same place. This is kind of frustrating when you are about to check the …

At inUse we use a method called Effect Mapping to determine how we will be able to achieve the desired business goals in a project. I am applying a light version of this for my iPhone Poker App project.
Why… am I going to do this? (The effects for the business you want to achieve)
I have two business objectives with the app:

Design the best iPhone multiplayer poker app on the market
Make the app work with one of the biggest poker sites/networks (for fun version)

I am going to put down a couple of …

It was a couple of years ago since I tried playing at PKR but now I am going to give it another try.
Last time I didn’t really see the point in playing in 3D making tells.
The downside of PKR is the time it takes to download the software. I’m sitting on a 100MB/s line but it still took me 10 minutes to install the software. That is way too long! PKR should consider adding things for the player to do while they wait.
But now it is time to start playing. …

Why do we play poker on Internet? From my experience there are at least four major reasons.
The four reasons:

Get recognition
Win money
For entertainment
Spend time with friends

Get recognition
A good poker player wants to recognised for his skills. Players can be recoginised in many different ways. Both by the poker site but also by having some kind of status on players. These players tend to stick to a few different poker sites since they have to play often to gain the status they want.
Win money
Players who play to win are usually play on …

This week’s redesign (I know it has been a while but now it’s back) is on NordicBet’s deposit page.
I signed up last night on NordicBet and the last step in the registration is the deposit page. It took me probably over a minute to figure out if NordicBet had more deposit options than by credit card.
The main task a player want to achieve when they go to the deposit page is to deposit money and we should help them do it!
On NordicBet’s page they have some banner like links to …