Few years back I worked a lot with lottopalace.com. It is a lottery operator that provides its users the opportunity to play the worlds most popular lotteries online. The main markets were the german speaking countries.
The services that lottopalace offered included lotteries, scratch cards and also few bingo games.
I was in charge of the design.
Problem
I was with LottoPalace since they started. At first they started with a couple of products but gradually they have been adding more and more products, settings and variations of them.
At some point the core product – the lotteries – were so overcrowded with settings that users were starting to get confused.
First they had to choose the lottery they want to play. Each lottery has different minimum number of slips that the user should fill up. Then they had different amount of numbers. After that the user should choose how many draws she wants to play, then if she wants to turn it into a subscription and play the same settings regularly and that is before she encounters the bonuses and tries to figure out which of them she should use.
We needed to simplify the process.
Insights
Initially when we designed the lottery slip page we did not have that many settings. Apart from that we were operating under the impression that our users would want to select each setting themselves. That was also what our preliminary research showed.
Imagine you want to play a lottery. You will want to select your numbers, probably your lucky numbers, correct?
Then you will probably want to select how many draws you want to play with those numbers.
This is what people in our initial research wanted anyway.
Our users
It turns out we and they were partially wrong. In the beginning we were targeting regular folks who play lotteries from time to time. And that strategy worked for them because they wanted to play their lucky numbers, they wanted to play usually 1 or 2 draws etc. They basically cared what settings they use for their lottery tickets. The thing with them is that they played once or twice and then did not come back.
Then the marketing strategy changed and few months later lots of our users were hardcore casino and lottery gamblers. They played a lot but they also behaved differently on the site.
We used tracking software such as Google Analytics and Hotjar to track their behaviour on the website.
After analysing the data we saw that the most used button at the lottery slip was the “autocomplete” button. That meant our users did not care what numbers and draws they were playing anymore.
At that time I was reading a book about cognitive psychology and how it can be used in design by Susan Weinschenk. It turns out it is studied and proven by the scientists that majority of the users go with the default settings, they never bother to change them.
Hypothesis
Based on the above research we came up with the following hypotheses.
- We believe that if we prefill the lottery slip with random numbers (with an option to edit, of course) it will simplify the process for the user and they will play more.
- We believe that most of the users will go with the default settings so we could increase sales just by choosing the proper settings by default.
Testing the hypothesis
Now we needed a way to verify our hypotheses.
Hypothesis number 1
We’ve developed a simple prototype and did usability testing on it. The feedback was very good so the design and specifications were ready for the developers to launch it for A/B testing.
Hypothesis number 2
We found a way to verify this hypothesis by changing a simple setting on another product and increase their sales 5 times. Read about it here.
Solution
The new proccess:
Results
Unfortunately this design was never implemented due to other unforeseen circumstances that happened at that time. But all the preliminary tests showed that it will increase sales of the lotteries as it did with the scratch cards and improve the customer experience.