UX Audit & Strategic Redesign

Palmerbet: unifying a fragmented betting experience

UX audit and strategic redesign of onboarding, navigation and the core betting experience across Palmerbet’s web and app platforms.

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Client: Palmerbet
Industry: Bookmaking / Gambling
Discipline: UX Audit & Strategic Redesign

The challenge

Palmerbet’s sports and racing sections had evolved separately, leaving inconsistent navigation, duplicated patterns and a fragmented experience. Racing and sports betting had different information hierarchies and interaction models, yet users needed fast access to time-sensitive information, especially during live events, and the platform had to support both quick bets and more considered wagering. Legacy patterns and technical constraints limited how much could be redesigned at once. The challenge was to unify the experience without erasing what made racing and sports betting different from each other.

The legacy Palmerbet desktop site with a sidebar navigation and a bet-slip flyout open, next to the old mobile app's stacked racing and sports listings — Legacy web and app navigation before the redesign: inconsistent patterns across platforms

Key responsibilities

Led the UX vision and design direction for unifying racing and sports into one betting experience
Defined priorities and interaction patterns for fast, time-sensitive live betting contexts
Worked closely with product, engineering and stakeholders to align design with usability, performance and business outcomes
Directed iterative testing of unified navigation and bet-slip patterns with real racing and sports audiences

Team & collaboration

Unifying two verticals meant keeping three groups aligned throughout, not just handing off a finished design at the end:

Role	Contribution	Relationship
Product	Aligned priorities and roadmap for the unified betting experience	Ongoing collaboration through direction-setting and delivery
Engineering	Partnered on feasibility for shared components — bet slips, odds displays, market cards — across racing and sports	Close collaboration through iterative build and testing
Stakeholders	Provided business context and reviewed decisions against usability and performance goals	Engaged throughout to keep design aligned with business outcomes

Unifying navigation without flattening the differences

A shared navigation and layout framework was introduced across racing and sports, without collapsing the distinct information needs of each vertical into one generic layout. Racing bettors and sports bettors think about markets differently, so unifying the frame around them mattered more than sanding down every difference in what appeared inside it.

A looping animation of the Palmerbet mobile prototype crossfading between the blue Racing home screen and the green Sports home screen — The same navigation frame carrying Sports and Racing in turn: consistent structure, sport-specific content

Weighing mobile navigation patterns

Racing and sports both needed deep navigation — meetings, bet types, favourites, account tools — without permanently spending screen space on a tab bar. Three patterns were prototyped and compared side by side: a navigation drawer, a bottom navigation bar, and a bottom dialog, each weighed against how often it would actually be reached for against how much chrome it cost on a small screen.

Three mobile navigation patterns compared side by side: a navigation drawer, a bottom navigation bar, and a bottom dialog, each shown on a phone mockup — Navigation drawer, bottom navigation and bottom dialog, compared early in the process

Designing for the pace of live betting

During live events, odds, race timers and market changes needed to be scannable at a glance under time pressure. Rather than surface every market and option upfront, information was layered through progressive disclosure: quick bettors could act fast on what mattered most, while more considered bettors could drill into further detail, without the interface needing to be redesigned twice for two different paces.

A system, not a one-off skin

Common components — bet slips, odds displays, market cards — were standardised across racing and sports, so each vertical’s specific bet types and language could still come through, while the underlying pattern library could support new sports, racing types or bet formats without redesigning core patterns each time. The redesign was tested iteratively with real racing and sports audiences before wider rollout, adjusting for how each group actually used time-sensitive information under pressure. The result held together as one coherent product, not two platforms wearing the same skin, with racing-focused and sports-focused users both responding positively to the change.

Design and research artefacts

A look behind the finished screens: the component library that kept racing and sports consistent, the pixel-level QA redlines that closed the gap between design and build, and the review annotations and information-architecture sketches worked through along the way.

The Palmerbet design system: header variants, slider, footer, form, icon set, category tabs, menu states, and componentised Racing and Sport modules on desktop and tablet — The shared component library: one set of parts assembled differently for racing and sports

A system built to outlast the redesign

Standardising racing and sports components only holds up long-term if two separate platform teams don’t quietly drift apart maintaining it. That’s the real reason the business needed Flutter, not just as a technical choice but as a strategic one: a single codebase meant the same design tokens, components and interaction patterns could ship to iOS, Android and web together, instead of each platform team reinterpreting — and separately re-QA’ing — the same system on its own schedule.

That turned out to be one of the project’s most valuable outcomes, arguably more so than any single feature it shipped. The redesign didn’t just unify how racing and sports looked across web and app — it gave Product, UX and engineering a shared, repeatable workflow: new bet types, sports or markets could move through design and into build on the same system, with far less bespoke handoff and manual QA each time. Rather than a one-off visual refresh, it became a cornerstone the team could keep building — and automating — against, long after this particular redesign shipped.

Bringing the system to iPad and iPhone

The same navigation frame and standardised modules extend to native devices next: home screens for both Sports and Racing, tailored to iPad and iPhone rather than adapted from the web layout.

A row of four screens: a partial laptop view of the My Stable panel, a tablet showing Racing, a tablet showing Sports, and a phone showing the Palmerbet home screen — Racing, Sports, My Stable and the mobile home screen, side by side

See it in production

The redesign, live on Palmerbet

These ideas didn't stay in a deck. Try the interactive prototype, or visit Palmerbet to see the unified navigation and live-betting patterns in use today.

Visit live product

Explore demo

Gallery

Mapping the Racing home screen's components from desktop to mobile
The same race-time grid, reworked from a desktop table into a mobile-friendly list
The same component system, carried across to the Sports experience
Design QA: pixel-level redlines closing the gap between design intent and what shipped
Working through open questions in review: consistency, transitions and how the betting-market taxonomy should nest
Structural exploration: wireframes, IA sketches and a comparison of mobile navigation patterns before settling on the dock