Screen Design - Touch-screen wagering

Placing a bet the touch-screen way

The NSW TAB decided to replace aging betting-ticket machines used by cashiers throughout their branch network. They chose The Hiser Group to design the touch-screen betting interface for their new dual-purpose ticket machines. The new machines were to be used both by cashiers and by customers for self-serve wagering (betting) on horse races.

So how do you place a bet anyway?

Our initial challenge was to find out as much as possible about racing. We approached this design problem in the same way that we would tackle any design problem from a user-centred perspective: find out what happens in the real world of customers and users.

We spent many hours observing, first-hand, exactly how people placed bets in pubs, clubs and TABs, and analysing the information we gathered.

Observations & artefacts bring the real world to us during design

As we usually do when we conduct field research, we discovered some interesting and surprising things. For example, we were astonished to watch race-to-jump betters (people who bet on races one after the other), often run from where they are watching the changing odds on a TV monitor, up to the cashier's window, to place a bet at the last possible moment before the race starts.

Capturing this type of information was crucial to understanding the mental model of enthusiastic punters. Artefacts like diagrams of the physical layout of TABs and clubs, and examples of ticketing errors, went up on the walls of our design room to help immerse us in the world of our target users.

Our challenge was to come up with a touch-screen design and application that could match the speed of a hand-written betting slip, be usable by first-time bettors (into the bargain), and be able to be used at night in a potentially noisy, smoky environment filled with distractions.

We exploited the natural advantages of the online environment; for example letting betters choose a race quickly by name, rather than transposing numbers for race meets onto a hard-copy ticket. Despite screen space constraints we were able to develop an easy-to-read and -fill online betting slip.

Customers brought the real world to us during testing

We evolved the screen design quickly through an iterative design-and-test process with TAB customers, one-on-one. While we didn't get to test the live application inside a pub environment, we did encounter some participants who brought the pub environment with them to our test sessions!

We moved from low-fidelity paper mockups, to testing with electronic mock-ups, and finally to producing a branded set of design graphics to go with the interaction design.

Trials

Results were so encouraging in terms of speed and effectiveness of the interface that we moved straight on to applying the same interaction model to sports betting.

The system is still undergoing trials and hasn't yet been implemented - but the new screen design shows a lot of promise.