Unified Limits — Making harm-reduction tools feel human

Flutter’s brands — Sky Bet, Paddy Power, Betfair and PokerStars — all offer Safer Gambling (SG) tools: features that help players maintain control and gamble responsibly.

• The user: bettors seeking to manage their own gambling behaviour.
• The problem: regulatory changes required restructuring the deposit limit tools.

The brief

• Rename the deposit limit tools.
• Adjust tool behaviour to meet the new regulations.
• Keep the same UX flow to protect adoption rates.

What users revealed

Testing the existing experience told a bigger story. The tools were outdated, scary and confusing — “Safer Gambling” read as a warning for addicts, not a healthy default.

• The tools didn’t feel related to each other.
• SG tools felt scary and disconnected.
• The visual language didn’t match the weight of the decision.

I know I could set some kind of limit. I just don’t know which one is the best for me, or how useful they are to me right now.

Staying narrow

• Regulatory compliant and fast to ship.
• But the tools would remain in a broken system — we’d have to revisit the bigger issue later.

Expanding scope

• Higher short-term pressure: timeline, tech and stakeholder alignment.
• Higher long-term return: a coherent system users understand and adopt voluntarily, not just forcibly.

The decision

I pushed to broaden the scope beyond deposit limits — a full overhaul, every tool, every case. The evidence made the argument for us.

I wasn’t proposing a bigger project. I proposed the right project.

A collaborative process: designers, product and users were present at every validation cycle. Over 5+ rounds of user testing we validated concepts, iconography and hierarchy — no decision was made on assumption alone.

1. Data behaviour

The tools page was redesigned and the promotional banners removed. The data was clear: banner CTAs drew only around 3% of the clicks the main-page CTAs did.

2. Mental models

How do you visually represent a deposit limit? We explored several directions. Users already had a mental model — from us, and from Revolut, Monzo and other fintech apps — so the gauge won.

3. Cognitive load

Removing clutter and enabling progressive disclosure. The deposit limit page was decluttered, and a limit widget was introduced in critical journey flows — like the deposit screen — so the limit is visible where the decision happens.

Gamification

Reward mechanics for users who proactively set limits.

Managing tools directly in page

All tools viewable and editable in the same surface. User testing showed it created confusion: people struggled to understand what was editable, what was informational, and how the tools related to each other.

Dev alignment

Some things weren’t feasible within the development timeline. The transactions section was delivered as a link to a separate transactions page, to be implemented as a future iteration.

Deposit limits set within the first week

+50%

Deposit limits set within the first week

What this measures: not just a conversion metric, but a sign that users finally understood which tool applied to them, why they existed and how to use them.

What this means: the same design decision, validated across four brands with distinct audiences, different visual identities and separate regulatory contexts.

A system that held up everywhere it was deployed.

Winning the argument for scope expansion was the right call. The evidence supported it. The outcome validated it.

But expanding scope in a regulated, time-pressured environment surfaces implementation edge cases that discovery alone can’t fully anticipate.