Design wise this was something new for the company, with the introduction of a new style of stacked logo, and a cleaner logo removing the heart beat in the background. The grass in the background and the font, and layout a pulled through onto the landing page that includes a video that auto loads. The call to action is split between registration, and Facebook registration to help with conversion.

The landing page has quite a few cards on it meaning you can create more banners and different players all being pulled into the one conversion funnel. This page has increased conversion, and registration so looks to be doing what it should.

See the live page here.

I was asked by Ladbrokes if I could take a look at there existing bingo site and suggest some ‘quick wins’ before the implementation of the new website structure that was coming in Q3 of 2013.

I started by getting a complete overview of the technologies and CMS and started with initial sketches. It was obvious that there was going to be limited coding time, here so looked to reuse code from other sections, and concentrated on structure and design.

1. Refocusing – The page needed some focusing, so using the design I created 3 main areas, each designed to be less dominant that the other . This gave the promotions more focus and helped draw the eye around the page.
2. Background Image – The colour of the page as it stands we quite blue. This was dominating the page. I wanted to turn this to an advantage. I decided to use a full size image that broke through the design and could be changed to give a different feeling. The white cleaner version was to be used from 8am to 7pm, and then would switch to a darker more glitzy background from 7pm.
3. Gold Tickers – All of the tickers on the page were designed to have a gold background giving a consistency to them all. On the jackpot feeds there was an addition of a small animation that showed coins stacking up.
4. Real Play/ Free Play – I made a small adjustment to the buttons across the site. Real Play buttons were now red, playing to the reverse psychology of push the button. The Free Play buttons are now green and slightly smaller, this giving it a slight less dominance guiding the player to the Real Play button.
5. Highlight Colour - Adding the additional splashes of colour are added with the purple gradient.
6. Bingo Draws – This was a main section that needed highlighting and had some in built rules. I added the use of a ticker style animation along with a highlight colour to help draw attention, and interest.

This is just some of the UI changes that I  suggested in my overall document, with design breakdowns read for the coders.

I was recently ask to look at a companies landing page to see if I could increase the conversion rate. It was important to consider the function of the page and the calls to action.

The goal was to drive more invites via the “get it for free”, but also to include the “purchase link”. The main focus was on the logic and creativity. The page as it stood was quite corporate, but the overall feel of the company was quite playful. So I decided to turn the SuperPowers into a comic book, with two styles of call to action, fun and playful, and corporate button style. This still includes all the main points made on the page, but in a new and interesting way. The layout style has also moved to horizontal as this has been proven to convert more effectively.

The next step is to put this page into rotation via AB testing. We’ll start with a low rotation to get some analytic data.

Take a look at the “Original Page” and compare this to my newly designed “Comic Book Page”.

I was asked by The White Company to prepare some thoughts on areas where we could improve there online customer experience and brand presentation.

This was and exercise in thinking outside the box, and pushing the brand forward. This was then put forward to the eCommerce Director, to decide where the brand was heading.

The document covered quick Fixes from Wedding Lists, Lifestyle Photography, to longer termed planned development and 360° Images and Video. With projects such as personalisation could potentially increase the response rate by as much as 40%.

See my review here: The White Company, a Critical Review

The new Bet Victor site was two years in the making.

Every element of this site was meticulously thought about and tested. Design, SEO, Speed, and User Experience were all taken into account. With this and a new agile release process this site was designed to be a market leader.

Logo Design / Branding

The aim was to learn from the difficulties previously experienced with the Victor Chandler logo and create a design that worked in multiple instances. As a script, the previous iteration struggled at small resolutions and as it was created from a stylized version of Victor’s signature, there was never the luxury of writing anything other than his name. This logo needed to use an existing font, to work at all resolutions, and to be clean and simple in order to prevent it dating too quickly. For this to work it was important not to follow key trends, and use lower case lettering as many companies had taken to doing, but to follow the more old school caps approach adopted by logos that have stood the test of time – IBM, JVC, SAMSUNG, TESCO to name but a few.

Brand Guidelines

The new approach was decided by the board of directors. My job was to make the new brand work, whilst retaining the feel of the old Victor Chandler brand. We had started to do a lot of advertising at key sporting events, and at horse racing tracks, so it was important that the brand was recognizable when a camera panned pasted at speed. We felt consistency was key and kept the colours of the products the same, and hinted at the old VC Branding with the small lozenge at the end of the text. When I produced the Brand Guidelines (Right) I produced two sets. A small two page cut down version to send out with any logo, and a full descriptive version for any agencies that may need more detail.

SEO

One of the biggest problems we faced was natural SEO. As the markets are made dynamically, the URL’s created were numbers that meant nothing to the Google Bot. The new site creates named and structured URL strings. These are useful to both the user and search engines. Victor Chandlers natural SEO has always been almost nonexistent, with the new 2.0 site live the benefits are already being seen.

User Experience

The user experience (UX) of this new site was the most debated problem of all. I created wireframes in OmniGraffle that would be looked over, reviewed and tested. Each product had a clearly defined user all of whom were using the site in a different way. Customer journey was important, but personalization is the future. We implemented an intelligent portal page that recognised what language you speak and would direct you to that territory. With a clever use of cookies, when you first select the product you want, you will never return to that page again. Cleaning up the customer journey, and improving repeated business is one example of the multitude of improvements that have been made, and are continuing to better the users experience.

Speed

Loading speed is something that I was keen to address. Our page load times were 6 seconds+. This was a massive hole where we were getting customer drop off. We had to get this timing down. We invested in some monitoring software, and set about addressing image size, code size, and anything that could improve the waterfall effect. The site now is one of the fastest in the industry, at 1.5 seconds.

Products

Bet Victor has a suite of nine products, and each of these products are used in very different ways:

• Sports – The traditional punter. Users move about a lot, and the site needs to handle a lot of data.
• Live – The dynamic better. Constantly changing, But users stay in one place.
• Casino – The high flyer. Users want to see a combination of old school Casino play alongside more engaging new games, and when on a Game will stay still for some time.
• Poker – Only used as an information point. Games are played else where.
• Games – The small stake, but repetitive customer. Users want to see new games, and when on a Game will stay still for some time.
• Spinroom – The lighter approach, designed for our female clientelle. Users want to see new slots, and when on a slot will stay still for some time.
• Live Casino – The “Real Time” experience. Users login in and stay in one place.
• Mobile – For betting on the go. Used once, to gain information on how to get the mobile apps.
• Financials – A different approach to playing the Markets. All on one screen, you stay in one place.

Each site has to be looked at and the user taken into account.

These are a few examples of the styles we sent out on a Friday afternoon so to hit the customers inbox by the weekend.

By adding Victor’s face to the logo, we wanted to create a recognition and build upon the familiarity that Victor currently has trackside at the races. With the aim to move the companies focus towards the lucrative football market, we wanted to almost unveil the man himself, and felt a very stylised silhouette worked well here. Whilst very aware of the heavy use of black as a brand colour, we felt a monochrome photoshoot would work with the existing guidelines, and also create quite a dramatic “Film Noir” feel as the man steps out from the shadows.

You can see from the advert that we tried to keep the look and feel as close as possible. These will run for 6 weeks, the run of the TV campaign.

Watch this video on YouTube.

We do this in a few ways. Up to date information and prices, and information about the best offers. You can see here a selection of the style of mails we send out. All of which have the latest odds, that click through to the website market to make it easier to place the bet. In some cases much like the Notting Forest Emails these are branded to the team/teams, and sent to a smaller selection. Moving forward the intention is to have team specific emails. Personalisation of emails and communications are the future of this market place.

These get sent out on a Friday afternoon so to hit the customers inbox by the weekend.

This consisted of an email, and landing page. The email broke our brand guidelines as we wanted to include some of the feel of the Nottingham Forests Branding. So it was important to balance the two brands equally. This has taken some time and as you can see went through quite a few iterations.

The landing page was quite simple. All we wanted from the player was there name, account number or username, and email address. So we mimicked the branding of the email to give the user a sense of completion, and safety.

The final product worked very well and we had a great response rate from this campaign.