👋 This was my first big UX research project – helping determine user personas and the user journey for a website where no research of any kind has been done before.
Site – bettingexpert.com
bettingexpert.com is a friendly place where sports fans can get betting tips. It’s a helpful community where experts and “ordinary people” share their sports knowledge to guide other people’s bets. There are tips for lots of sports, from football to basketball. The site gives the scoop on game stats and insights, helping people not only bet, but also just get informed about upcoming sports events.
Goals
As bettingexpert.com is owned by a big company (Better Collective) with hundreds of brands, it had no solely dedicated designers or user researchers. This made it go on without much user research for years, so the first goal was getting to know the users.
Another important goal was to figure out why one of the most important types of pages was performing badly and what needed to be done to make the user stay on the page longer and benefit from all of the great content there.
All this to see how we could make people convert to bookmakers pages from ours, bringing more revenue to us, the affiliate company. I did research with (at time) a fellow junior UX Researcher.
Methods and tools we used
- Google Analytics to see who the user is demographically speaking, how they arrive to bettingexpert, and where the majority is from geographically (this was important for us partly also because of compliance and incentive distribution). This step helped us determine how to proceed with research.
- A survey where we prompted users from the UK who land on the page with offered incentives to see why the majority visit event pages (and bettingexpert in general), what competitor products they use and why, how many bookmakers they have, and what they value in tips. This was important to get some quantitative, as well as qualitative data to help us base our further research in in-depth interviews.
- Heatmaps and session recordings to see how far the user scrolls and what the frustration points are.
- Usability test with different scenarios was given to new users (as seen from GA, those were a big part of bettingexpert users, so their opinion mattered) to see how users find tips on the event pages, as well as how they perceive the page.
- Interviews with 5 people to gain a deeper understanding of the user, and to confirm the survey findings.
Pain points
😕 These are the issues that were often brought up:
- The page layout is too complex, too long, and the content is scattered, which makes it hard to scan quickly
- Users about the font size, team info on the hero image is too wide/separated
- Same tips in different places take up a lot of space
- Some types of tips and icons representing them are unclear to the user (both new and returning)
Impact
💪 This research helped us determine:
- 2 separate user personas: tipster and tip-seeker (and more within those 2 groups)
- A typical user journey of finding a tip
My feelings about this projects
I loved this project for just how big and challenging it was, not only being my first project, but being the first fully executed user research project on bettingexpert pages. I also loved that this was a project I did together with my colleague. Both of us had making this research plan as our hiring task, and then we got to actually do all the things we said we would do in the research plan.
There were some challenging parts of this project that I didn’t enjoy so much, such as convincing stakeholders at every step why what we are doing is important, why we need their help and input and why we need to get incentives for user participation etc. It was all worth it in the end, and our results made it easier to conduct research in the future.
Neda Đačić - UX Researcher 