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‘You can’t please everyone.’ The old adage that plagues or inspires people. There’s a fine line between catering and alienating. In business, this can be the point of success or failure. Online casino is a multi-billion-dollar business, which means a whole lot of people play. When there’s this many people, usually there’s diversity too: different desires, needs, and habits.
It’s a difficult job to account for all the variety, while maintaining the integrity of the brand and product. Yet the industry achieves it. How?
Understanding Their Target Audience
Few things are successful with the take-me-as-I-am-or-not-at-all approach. There must be a compromise. Companies who are successful know who their audience is or should be. A goal is in mind. Taking an example from outside the casino world: Coca-Cola the global beverage company have been adapting their recipes to customers demands for years. Customers have been wanting low-sugar and no-sugar drinks. Coca-Cola have been tweaking their recipes to meet these needs while maintaining the essential taste their customers know and love. The strategy is called Beverage for Life.
How this applies to online casino is as expected: yes, a company must know who it is and what it does but, even if its revered as an institution of the industry, it must adapt. So, online casinos have different areas within themselves. Gamers in some cases want the more social and luxury feeling land-based casinos afford and so they chose the Live Casino tabs on websites. Some want the quick-and-easy games, like scratch cards, so just need the screen with the more cartoony-screened aesthetics conventionally seen under ‘Games’ tab. Poker in its stripped-back online form, with less socialness, is what people use online casino for. They have their Coca-Cola, their Diet Coke, their Coke Zero, and Coca-Cola Life branches.
Each section has its own feel, despite being completely recognisable that each one is part of a larger site. This isn’t to say, though, that if a user would find their selves in the ‘wrong’ section that it is uninviting. Persuasive design underpins this. A user will be able to see where they are and could be tempted to explore it.
Ensuring Strong Accessibility
Technological advancements has allowed online casinos to played on more devices than ever before. Consistency across all devices becomes both a challenge and paramount, both in web browsers and as apps. New casinos keep upping the level of quality as seen by the latest casinos launched in 2020. The industry standard always changes – either because the top company innovates or because the challenger best them. Responses are key.
Clean and neat designs ease transition between the customer’s devices. Busy home pages can be off putting and so online casinos tend to opt for only key information to be displayed. A sliding header displaying all the big bonuses available; the tabs easily organised and visible at the top or side; the names and icons of awards shown off; the logos for accepted payment methods. Users know all they need to and see all they need to.
The change to HTML5 has made mobile gaming possible (due to Apple’s refusal to use Flash). But has had the added effect of needing any plug-ins or external software to run the content in web browser. Everything is contained.
Ensuring Variety For Diverse Players
Some markets are more niche than others, but the online casino industry is able to boast one of the most diverse fanbases in the world. Much like the gaming industry’s market, the microcosm of the online casino gives rise to – and must provide suitable content for – an incredibly wide range of tastes, interests, and inclinations.
It is for this reason that sites offer digital content libraries bursting with titles, all of which play to different themes and styles. Much like Netflix must cultivate a wide range of content categories in order to retain (and grow) its existing userbase, the online casino must ensure that their ‘digital shopfront’ is brought to life by considerable array of gaming titles.
There is, in essence, no ‘one’ fan of the online casino. Fans will find their niche within the industry, and the industry must bend to that.
Similarly, the industry must find ways of organising this content. As the number of titles on offer to players continues to grow, casinos risk overwhelming themselves with the sheer volume of content they possess. Again, like Netflix and other digital content sites, the use of AI and machine learning algorithms help to sort through this content, and make personalised recommendations to users.
We have all grown accustomed to sites, from YouTube to Amazon, learning our habits and interests in order to tailor our homepages to us. It would not do for a casino – even one that offered hundreds of top quality games to users – to let their members flounder in a sea of disorganised titles.
By adopting AI, these sites can learn their users’ habits, and ensure that all relevant titles find their way onto the right homepages and recommendations.
What They’re Here For
Designers work hard to ensure that they give the casino every chance of enticing customers and that they become as existing customers. What is at its core, though, is what is most important: the content. There must be the games which customers want to play, with bonuses which feel generous and worthwhile, while supporting all this with strong customer support and concern. A business cannot be all aesthetics.
It would have been easy for the casino to lose itself beneath a heap of games, and to grow into its own niche within the online gaming community. Through the tireless work of developers, however, this sites have been able to augment their status as a mainstay of the entire gaming industry, and to ensure that they continue to draw in – and retain – countless players from around the world each and every year.
We can anticipate further advancements within the world of the online casino in the years to come.
