Q&A: Daniel Durrans, design lead at Casumo

Casumo’s design lead Daniel Durrans discusses the operator’s ongoing battle to bring the desktop experience to mobile

EGR Mobile Intelligence (EGR MI): What is your strategy and development plan for mobile?

Daniel Durrans (DD):  Over the past two years it has been to build a mobile product that our players love. We don’t just focus on adding new features, we’ve focused on details, key interactions, the speed and performance of the product and reducing the complexity.

Since last year we’ve released more features that elevate the capability of the product. Going forward, the strategy is to keep pushing the bar higher when it comes to crafting this experience for our players.

Our overall product strategy is device agnostic with a long-term vision across our products and it helps inform every single decision we make along the way.

We ensure the experience is optimised across the most common devices first. We have a very good testing set up internally and our design process really takes all these challenges into account. We thought it all through before designing the mobile product.

EGR MI: How much of a focus is Casumo placing on mobile as part of the overall business? What percentage of players come through mobile?

DD: It has our full focus. I feel like we’re changing the way we think about mobile. There’s a legacy mindset in the industry of it as a brand new platform and a new frontier but I think that is evaporating. We’re actually disbanding our dedicated mobile team so that mobile thinking is absorbed into the whole organisation. This makes it much harder for mobile to ever be an afterthought. It creates a shared responsibility and that wasn’t a hard sell because over 50% of deposits are coming from mobile now and it’s something that everyone is on board with.

EGR MI: You entered the UK market last year, how has business been?

DD: We’ve had an extremely positive response from UK players even though we’ve only been live in the market for six months. We can see our product, communication and brand is being very well received.

The mobile product is particularly strong in the UK and I can see a mobile savvy market would respond well to our approach to mobile seeing as we’re trying to make products that people love to use and has a meaningful place in their lives.

EGR MI: Casumo has grown quickly since launch – how do you balance maintaining current business and growth and improving product technology to handle larger volumes?

DD: We deal with those challenges in various ways. We have a dedicated group of people that cater for the ever growing performance and scalability needs of the platform by doing performance tests and to anticipate bottlenecks and scale out accordingly. In general anticipation lets us be proactive.

We don’t just aim to future proof our platform, we look at all areas of the business. This foresight helps us with recruitment, how we organise ourselves internally and understanding what needs a particular focus at any given time.

EGR MI: At Casumo you do your development in-house. Why have you made that decision? What are the pros and cons?

DD: We have smart founders that are in touch with the human element that goes into product development. The idea is that the product is just a by-product of the people and culture that we have and that is something that is impossible to foster if you outsource in that area. Casumo built its own platform so it owns its own technology and has the legacy of doing things in-house which has been there from the beginning so it’s very deep rooted.

Scaling the approach as we grow is the challenge but we’ve known that for a long time and that’s helped us to plan ahead and adapt the way we organise ourselves so we can anticipate change and embrace it.

EGR MI: What are the challenges with developing native apps?

DD: We launched an iOS app in March and we introduced some unique features in there. The technology opens up a completely new way to experience the product. One way is pinching the screen to minimise a game, which allows a player to stay in the game and auto-spin for example while they make a deposit or if they want to choose another game and check their position on a live leaderboard.

The other challenge with native is the regulatory issues as real-money gambling still isn’t allowed through the Google Play store. We don’t feel native is serving everyone it could because of the limitations on Android and some markets have different regulations through Apple App Store.

EGR MI: Have you made any changes, updates or refreshes to your mobile products over the last 12 months?

DD: Yes, we are always iterating on our mobile products. We’ve put a lot of work into asking the right questions before we go looking for answers so it helps us to understand what is important to focus on.

The in-game experience we now have in place for our ‘Reel Races’ tournament mechanic on mobile really stands out. It’s possible to auto-spin and follow the live, real-time leaderboard at the same time. This is especially useful as our tournaments are scheduled, for example every evening at 7pm we have our £1,000 leaderboard, and players are able to have a great experience taking part on their mobile from anywhere.

EGR MI: How important is gamification as part of the Casumo offering and how do you maximise the benefits from it?

DD: From a product experience point of view, gamification is really what Casumo is built on from the beginning. It’s not something we thought about after launching a casino product, it was baked in right from the start.

The gamification layer that we have helps to combine social and real-money gaming so it’s a full player engagement engine. We reward players the more they play so as they progress through the adventure their connection with the product deepens. Our players form a real relationship with the product in a way that a more traditional casino model would find more difficult.

EGR MI: How have you incorporated personalisation in to your mobile offering?

DD: Every player has a personalised dashboard where they get tailored content and game recommendations and receive rewards, an overview of their adventure progress and also personalised suggestions for players when they are looking for new games.

EGR MI: What do you see as being the developing trends around mobile and tablet?

DD: Trying to get a mobile product on par with desktop quality is probably the biggest challenge that everyone is facing. Operators, developers and designers working on products have had much longer to get good at designing for desktop. Mobile has been around for a long time but is still a newer technology and there’s just less experience in how to develop great mobile products.

Overall it’s down to the quality, user experience and performance. It’s about getting the basics up to scratch. I think that’s the main thing. I don’t see any other huge trends in the area. Of course people are going to innovate and that’s certainly something Casumo is going to do but overall I think it’s about raising the bar of quality for what a mobile product should be in a gaming sense.

EGR MI: Do you see further opportunities opening up in technologies such as VR, AR, wearables etc?

DD: We’re interested of course and we keep our eye on it. When a new technology comes out often you have to understand where that fits into the landscape and what the best use of that would be. We have some ideas of things we can try out but you have to see how things develop. In some cases the technology itself is quite primitive, it’s the potential that is interesting.

EGR MI: What’s your mobile vision for Casumo?

DD: The vision we have is very ambitious. We want to continue to release regular updates on our native app. In general to have the whole organisation thinking about mobile all the time and understanding what the opportunity is. If we do this, we will continue to have the best product out there.