Rebuilding a Sportsbook and Casino App for Africa’s Mobile Reality

A dedicated hybrid mobile app for iOS and Android, delivered end-to-end under hard marketplace and compliance constraints – built to accelerate time-to-market without inflating development cost.

PROOF IN ONE GLANCE

KEY OUTCOMES

BEHIND THE BRAND

Playgems is a sportsbook and casino platform provider whose technology powers operator brands across African markets, including WeBet.
The company works in a region where liquidity is thinner and mobile infrastructure less reliable than in Western markets – conditions that shape every product and design decision.

CHALLENGE

Playgems needed to address rising user churn tied to friction in its mobile sportsbook and casino experience,  but had no existing analytics showing exactly where users were dropping off. The team knew the what (churn, weak conversion) without the where.

Two market realities made the fix harder than a standard redesign:

• High mobile data costs and slow connections across much of Playgems’ user base meant every screen had to be rebuilt for minimal data payload, not limiting it to just visual polish.
• Local user expectations run counter to typical betting-app design trends: African bettors generally expect denser information on a single screen, rather than the minimalist, whitespace-heavy layouts common in Western sportsbook design.
• The engagement was also scoped narrowly: Playgems owned frontend and backend development in-house, so CrustLab’s mandate was UX/UI design only – working within the platform’s existing application programming interface (API) and backend constraints rather than designing flows from a blank slate.

Solution

CrustLab ran the engagement as a design-sprint-led workshop process, pairing the design team with an iGaming domain expert so that UX decisions are reflecting real betting behavior.

The redesign covered five areas:

• Main Betting Page & Bet Ticket: The highest-traffic screen, rebuilt with a lightweight, modular component layout for faster match discovery and quick-bet placement.
• Market Sub-page: Streamlined odds and betting-option views, with optimized nested data structures to cut screen-redraw latency on slow networks.
• Wallet Management: A clearer deposit, balance, and withdrawal flow, using simplified modal transitions to reduce multi-step drop-off.
• Crash Games Lobby: A high-visibility lobby redesign for fast-paced crash games, built for quick game launches with minimal asset download sizes.
• Dual Navigation Bars & Icon Sets: A redesigned top and bottom navigation system with a custom, compressed SVG (scalable vector graphics) icon set for instant loading and clear tap targets.

With no baseline data to work from, CrustLab took a variations-first approach: every screen was delivered in three UI variations (A/B/C), giving Playgems a built-in framework for testing rather than a single, unvalidated redesign. All assets were built under strict compression rules to keep the experience fast on low-bandwidth networks, and final designs were handed off as implementation-ready Figma specs for Playgems’ web stack, with Flutter as the target for mobile handover.

Results

The engagement delivered a complete UX design system across the platform’s core screens and navigation.