The Three Crucial Areas In Which Online Casino Apps Must Deliver

One of the dirty little secrets of land-based casinos is that they are often designed specifically to be difficult to navigate. Gamblers who can’t find their way out are potentially going to gamble a little more than they intended to.

Keeping customers gambling at an online casino is an entirely different enterprise. Everyone knows the way out. Not everyone has the willpower to leave, necessarily, but as far as finding the exits goes, it’s simple: one swipe and you’re gone.

The goal isn’t to confuse online players into sticking around. Rather, when there are competing online casinos just a finger tap away, the goal is to make the experience as easy and intuitive as possible so that players desire to keep coming back to that particular app.

Last week, research firm Eilers & Krejcik Gaming (EKG) released its latest round of U.S. iCasino app rankings — based not on revenue or popularity, but on user score at the end of extensive testing.

Compared to sportsbook apps, “online casinos are more homogenous in nature,” EKG Lead Product Analyst Danny McCarthy explained to Casino Reports.

In other words, there’s not excessive differentiation to be found in the approach of any two iCasino apps. As McCarthy’s colleague, Director of Product Analysis Jimmy Neilly, expanded, “There’s more of a central expectation for what the feature set is going to be. Some apps break from that a little bit, but there’s a fairly cohesive idea of what the casino product will be.”

Having completed their recent cycle of testing, using about 60 testers at various times across a three-week window, Neilly and McCarthy identified the three vital areas casino apps most need to deliver on in order to find success.

1. Speed and stability

“The most important thing,” McCarthy said, “is the speed and stability of the app. If the speed isn’t there, if it’s lagging, if there are stability issues, that affects the entirety of the performance. It affects other areas of the app more than any other individual thing about the app.”

Casino apps have come a long way on this front in the last several years. The three major iCasino states are New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, and they launched in 2013, 2019, and 2021, respectively, so the phrase “in the early days” means something different in each state. Still, going back about four or five years, games crashing and slots freezing while spinning was a common part of the playing experience on most sites.

Now, the tech has improved to where it’s an outlier when a casino app is unstable.

“All those things are improving, both in terms of third-party game providers and in-house games — both of those appear to be doing so much better in the last few years,” Neilly said. “When that tester commentary comes through and we’re getting the feedback from the testers, previously crashing was everywhere, you could find it on pretty much every app. Now it’s only in very particular spots and on specific apps, that there is this pain point, this hurdle with the game loading, or the game exiting, or the game switching being really poor.

“I don’t want to say it has been solved, but it has been greatly improved upon. There has been this shift over the last few years to improved game loading times, improved overall game speed, and improved overall game stability.”

2. Organization and navigation

Even if you’ve never played online casino, you should be familiar with the concept of home screen organization and navigation as long as you subscribe to at least one TV/movie streaming network. Think of Netflix, HBO Max, Hulu, etc. They each strive to present you with content that may interest you, organized in several different ways.

Pulling off that feat effectively is what the EKG team views as the second fundamental facet of a casino app.

“Everything needs to be easy to find,” McCarthy emphasized. “And that involves both known and unknown game content. Known game content, that’s about being able to ‘favorite’ games you like so you can find them again, you want to see recently played, you want to be able to search for specific titles. And then unknown game content, that’s about finding games you haven’t necessarily played before. We look for apps that have good categorization. So maybe you like slots, but you want to see it organized by provider, or you want to see progressive slots. The strongest apps will point you to certain games you might like but have not have played before.”

Algorithms are key here. The app is watching your playing habits, and filling your carousel accordingly.

“It cuts through one of the issues that these apps used to have, which was that they might have 1,000 games, but it was all in a big, long scroll and there was not a whole lot of filtering that you can do,” Neilly said. “Now, a good app has a game discovery section there to help the user. You’re seeing recommendations, games you’ve favorited, and the result is a structure that is helping players find the game they want in a quicker fashion and also in a more optimized and preferred way — so they don’t feel like they’re fighting against the app to get into their game.”

McCarthy noted that the better apps now extend this approach to the after-the-game experience as well, meaning then when a customer is exiting a game, they’re receiving suggestions for other games to try without having to go back to the lobby.

One other detail of note on the navigation front: The search function isn’t used nearly as much as it once was. Every app still has a search bar, of course, but the game discovery carousels have improved to the point that most players find what they want now without having to start typing the name of a game.

3. Game content

An app where the games are easy to find is wonderful, and of course so is an app that doesn’t crash while you’re playing those games. But none of that matters much over the long haul if the games themselves aren’t to a player’s liking.

This is where much of the iCasino app war is currently being waged.

“On the game-depth side of things, we’re starting to see these libraries fill out in a whole bunch of different ways, whether it’s on the live casino side, whether it’s on the exclusive side, whether it’s on the free-to-play side or the differentiated mechanics side, these libraries are really filling out,” Neilly said. “Game depth and game content, that’s an area where the apps can continue to raise their score. There’s still room for them to grow.

“On the UX (user experience) and UI (user interface) side of things, that’s something that can really only hurt your score. Obviously, you can have a good UI and a good navigational infrastructure, but people will take that as a given — your speed should be really quick, always, no matter what. So when you miss the mark on UX or UI, you’re going to see testing scores dip. On the game depth side, it’s inverted. You start from a low floor, and you have much more of a ceiling to grow toward.”

As for the types of game content people are looking for, that’s constantly evolving. The focus changes over time — from live dealer one month, to jackpots and progressives the next, to “crash” games (like DraftKings’ Rocket) the next.

Other elements outside the top three

A quick look at a few other casino app areas that the EKG analysts addressed:

Deposits and withdrawals: McCarthy acknowledged this is “absolutely very important,” but said “it isn’t a top pain point for testers because most apps do it very well. Almost every single app does deposits well. We see a little more differentiation with withdrawals, in terms of speed or minimum amounts, but by and large, most apps handle withdrawals very well.”

Responsible gambling tools: The ability to set time/wager/spending limits is part of why slots influencer Brian Christopher thinks online casino is safer than brick-and-mortar, but EKG hasn’t focused on it much in testing. “I think that’s probably the type of thing, until you need it, you don’t realize you need it — and then when you do need it, it becomes extremely important,” McCarthy said. “But I definitely feel like the desire to have those tools and the importance placed on them is more so in response to regulation from the industry than from players’ desire to have those tools.”

Promotions and bonuses: It’s not that welcome offers and daily promos and free spins aren’t important to customers. For some players, the rare chance to play casino games with a positive expected value is the biggest draw. But based on EKG’s methods, it’s tough to put this in the top three. “Free-to-play games and promotions are obviously very important,” McCarthy said. “But we have testers in different states (mostly New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan), so this area is a little bit harder to test for because different testers get different promotions.”