As with most web-based industries, the iGaming sector has been massively impacted by the sea change in web browsing behaviour. For a couple of years now, the majority of punters use their mobile phones to gamble. And it’s pretty much the same for bingo and online casinos. Of course this wasn’t always the case. The primacy of desktop platforms about a decade ago meant that developers had it pretty easy when crafting websites.
The Demand for Responsive Mobile Casinos
However, the proliferation of smart devices opened a Pandora’s Box of problems for web designers. The main challenges related to design consistency and reliability. Just how was it possible to build a website that rendered well across all devices? And what about security, bugs and loading times? CSS media queries offered a solution to the first question. Steve Job’s 2010 castigation of Flash and his advancement of HTML5 provided an answer to the second.
Today, the most successful mobile casinos are usually triumphs of design ingenuity, able to operate across desktops, mobile phones and tablets. It’s the same with many white-label casinos too, whose owners are often at pains to serve their players with fully-responsive platforms. If you’re an operator, there really is no alternative. To stay afloat in what amounts to a viciously competitive gambling vertical, your site needs to cut the mustard whatever device on which your customers choose to play.
Mobile Casino Case Studies
With this in mind, which online casinos have the best mobile websites? What follows are three examples of mobile casino development at its very best. As many sites that do casino reviews will attest, these three operators set the bar very high.
Casumo
Casumo was one of the first online casinos to offer gamification as part of its overall gaming package. This was supported by a ground-breaking design that avoided the hackneyed layouts employed by many of its rivals. Instead of a conventional grid of thumbnails and an enormous promotional header, the designers decided to reinvent the wheel. The games were arranged in large horizontal rows and a very basic left-sided menu installed under the logo. Minimalism was clearly the by-word. And so was flexibility. The use of such a layout made it far easier for the developers to ensure design consistency. Although the Casumo platform has changed quite a bit over the years, the principles that went into its creation are still very much evident – namely, simplicity and ease of use.
PlayOJO
Play OJO is another mobile casino that caters for gamers-on-the-go-very well. Although there’s nothing particularly ground-breaking as far as appearances goes, its responsive platform says a great deal about the growing sophistication of smart-phone users. In the early days of responsive design, developers would often include instructions on how to use their websites. Commands such as ‘swipe-right’ or ‘scroll-down’ were fairly common across many platforms. But things have come a long way since then. These days, most of us don’t need cues when finding our way around a mobile casino. The people behind Play OJO as well as many other operators clearly recognise this and assume their players know how to browse their games. A tiny scroll bar is the only indicator that the horizontally arranged thumbnails can be swiped. If you think about it, this constitutes quite a leap of faith for developers. Ok, so there are such things as split testing. But it does indicate how browsing habits are becoming more refined.
Casimba
Casimba is one of those online casinos that illustrate the compromises designers sometimes have to make when it comes to responsive design. The desktop site features a huge promotional header complete with the video of a lion roaming a high-street as well as an animation pulled directly from a slot game. It looks great of course, especially on larger screens. But what about on mobile devices? Although Google Chrome’s developer tools seem to indicate that both the video and animation are also rendered on smart-devices, this isn’t actually the case. Why? Because including these elements would have a big impact on page load times. Nevertheless, Casimba’s mobile website manages to retain the polished look and feel of its desktop counterpart.