UX/UI Design • 2024
From agency-led to internally owned, migrating BetAnySports into BetAnything
When BetAnySports began its transition to BetAnything, an external agency was already leading the design. Our internal UX team was brand new, and we still had to prove we could take things from there... No pressure, right?
I got involved in everything from research and information architecture to wireframes, prototypes, and usability testing. Together, we built a more consistent experience and a design system of our own. And somewhere along the way, we earned the trust to take the lead.
Role
UX/UI Designer (Mid-Senior)
Timeframe
9 months, 2024
Team
3 UX/UI Designers, plus a UX/UI Lead
Reach
13K active users on launch day, up from 9.6K
Starting point
BetAnySports had grown for years under outside agency direction. Interfaces were inconsistent across sports, casino, lottery and horses, ownership of design decisions was unclear, and documentation was thin.
Our newly formed internal UX team inherited all of that complexity, plus the job of proving, screen by screen, that an internal process could actually do better.
No shared design system: every product vertical had grown its own visual habits.
Navigation and content decisions lived in scattered agency files, not one source of truth.
The migration had to ship without hurting a live, revenue-generating platform.
BetAnySports, the legacy platform we inherited.
The design challenge
How could we earn the trust to lead the redesign without disrupting the experience users already knew?
Key findings
Before redesigning anything, we ran a competitive audit to benchmark layout patterns and see how other sportsbooks approached their hero sections on desktop and mobile. There wasn't one perfect formula, but a few things stood out.
- Headline lengths were all over the place, ranging from 15 to 91 characters. So instead of following a number, we focused on making the message clear.
- The strongest examples kept things simple: one focused headline and one clear call to action, rather than several competing for attention.
Desktop hero benchmarking
Mobile hero benchmarking
The solution
Our hypothesis was simple. If every design decision was backed by research and tested with real users, the internal team wouldn't need to ask for trust. The work would earn it on its own. So instead of treating the migration as a visual refresh, we focused on three things:
Rethink the structure around how people actually navigate, rather than how the old platform was organized.
Create one shared design system to bring consistency across all four betting verticals.
Test our ideas with real users to catch usability issues before launch.
The transformation, at a glance
Same platform, entirely new experience: from a dense, navy-and-gold sportsbook template to a bold, editorial betting brand built to feel premium across every vertical. Drag to compare both homepages.
Rebuilding the structure
Over time, BetAnySports had grown quite a bit by addition, not intention. New pages, promotions, and features kept getting added wherever there was room, but the navigation hadn't really kept up.
So we went back to the basics. I helped rethink the information architecture based on user flows and organize the content strategy for both logged in and logged out users, making it easier to see how everything should fit together.
Sitemap & userflows
Content strategy, pre- and post-login
Bringing everything together with BA-Core
As BetAnything started taking shape, we also needed a way to keep everything consistent. That's where BA-Core came in, our shared design system.
I helped build and expand its components, typography, and styles so that Sports, Casino, Lottery, and Horses could finally feel like part of the same family.
System overview
Color palette
Typographic scale
Button components
Card components
Icon system
Drag to explore
Testing showed us what we'd missed
To see how well the new experience actually worked, we conducted a usability study across two rounds of testing. In one of them, six moderated sessions revealed a few things we hadn't quite figured out yet.
4 of 6 participants struggled to find Casino inside a horizontal card scroll.
5 of 6 couldn't navigate to NFL listings under Offshore Lines.
4 of 6 hesitated to confirm whether a bet had actually been placed.
2 of 6 tapped "See More" instead of "Play Now," a clear mismatch in CTA hierarchy.
Affinity diagram
Navigation issue
Validated patterns
These findings helped us spot what wasn't working as expected, giving us a clearer idea of what needed to change before moving forward. You can explore the full research process and how we addressed these issues in the usability study.
The outcome
BetAnything launched as a single, consistent product across sports, casino, lottery and horses, built on the design system the internal team now owns.
Pre-login home
Post-login home
Promotions
Sportsbook
Drag to explore
Results
The platform relaunched on July 29, 2025. On launch day, active users rose to 13K from 9.6K the day before, and 26K new users showed up. People stayed longer too: average engagement time hit 6m 07s, nearly triple the pre-launch baseline.
The numbers didn't fade after launch day. Through the first week, daily active users held between 9.7K and 10K. After the relaunch, players averaged 250 bets per month, and lifetime value reached $400 per player.
The change that mattered most to me happened inside the company. UX went from executing an agency's strategy to owning it.
What I learned
Credibility doesn't come from one good presentation. It came from showing the work again and again: the audit behind a decision, the test that checked it, the system that made it last.
Being involved from early research to the final usability tests is what let our team's version speak for itself.
What I'd do differently
I'd bring usability testing in earlier. Catching navigation issues sooner could have helped shape the information architecture from the first sitemap.
I'd document from day one. Gathering everything for this case study took longer than expected without proper documentation.
Behind the scenes
The team working through wireframes, and the low-fidelity sketches that came out of it.
Questions about this project
Earning trust as a brand-new internal team while an external agency was still actively shaping the same platform's direction, and doing it without slowing down a live, revenue-generating migration.
Moderated usability testing with six participants, comparing task completion and hesitation before and after the restructure, plus a full retest once the fixes shipped.
No. Once leadership compared both directions, the internally-designed version moved forward and our team stayed on as BetAnything's design owner going forward.
Bring usability testing in earlier. Some of the navigation issues we caught late in the process could have shaped the information architecture from the very first sitemap.
