Experience Intelligence Is Forcing Product Authority Up the iGaming Stack
- Kevin Jones
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
As rising compliance costs and margin compression push operators to defend every product decision in revenue terms, this interview examines how user-experience data is shifting from optional design input to financial control mechanism.
Under sustained promotional pressure and shrinking tolerance for friction, decision power inside gambling organisations is migrating toward metrics that directly influence conversion, churn, and support cost rather than creative judgement alone.
In this interview, Fraser Dunk, Founder and CEO of Jurnil, describes how what operators initially treat as a tactical UX audit frequently becomes a continuous monitoring layer that shapes roadmap prioritisation, budget allocation, and cross-department accountability. His answers expose a structural contradiction: companies endorse data-led optimisation while maintaining organisational silos that prevent it from governing commercial trade-offs. The discussion identifies operational weak points — early-session trust decay, expectation gaps between advertising and delivery, and behaviour patterns invisible to funnels — indicating that experience intelligence is redefining how gambling businesses validate instinct, assign capital, and justify platform changes under tightening financial and regulatory constraints.
Gaming Eminence: When operators first engage with Jurnii, what do they typically think they’re buying versus what they eventually realise they need? Where does that gap usually sit — product, marketing, leadership alignment, or something else entirely?
Fraser Dunk: "Most operators first come to Jurnii expecting a UX audit tool — a platform that will compare their user experience to competitors and maybe surface a few areas for improvement. It’s typically viewed as a tactical product tool at first glance.
But what they quickly realise is that Jurnii provides far more than a list of tweaks. On average, our platform identifies over 70 actionable UX recommendations per audit — effectively generating a full optimisation roadmap, ranked by severity and commercial impact. And that’s just the start.
Where the real value emerges is in the platform’s tracking capability. Jurnii doesn’t just benchmark UX in a moment of time — it continuously monitors your experience and your competitors’, capturing new feature launches, A/B tests, promo formats, and UX shifts across the market.
In that sense, Jurnii evolves from being an audit tool to becoming a strategic tracker and intelligence layer — one that connects product, marketing, and leadership teams with a shared view of where they are, where the market is moving, and where the biggest experience gaps are.
The gap we help close is usually cross-functional; providing an objective, unified view of a brand’s experience in typically subjective fields."
Gaming Eminence: Looking back across your work with igaming and betting operators, can you recall a moment where a client insight materially changed how you approach CX or experience intelligence today? Not a success story, but a real learning moment.
FD: "There’s one moment that really changed how I think about player experience — and it came from stepping outside the product entirely.
I was part of an ethnographic research project where we spent time not just watching players use a site, but observing them in their daily routines. We’d sit with them as they played, but also as they went about their day to day, hoping to understand the triggers of gameplay.
What emerged was fascinating: players had very specific emotional and habitual triggers — routines they used to "prepare" for a session, and beliefs about luck that shaped how and when they played. This might be someone playing when they have their favourite cup of tea, or twiddling their lucky coin as they play a slot machine, or not watching the event they have bet on out of superstition.
This completely shifted our thinking. Rather than just personalising a lobby with recent games or promotions, we designed gameplay rituals into the UX — like “lucky” characters players could engage with, based on the types of superstitions we’d seen. Something a player might have done physically (like always playing after a beer, or at 8pm) became part of the digital experience.
That kind of insight doesn’t show up in analytics. You can’t see it in a funnel. It comes from proactive, human-centred research — and it taught me that habit and emotion are often more powerful levers than functionality."
Gaming Eminence: Experience data is often discussed at board level, but decisions are still made deep inside product and marketing teams. In practice, where have you seen experience intelligence genuinely influence decision-making and where does it most often get diluted or ignored?
FD: "The organisations that extract real value from experience intelligence are the ones who tie it to commercial outcomes.
Every operator tracks the same core metrics: NGR, churn, actives, ARPU. But very few take the time to understand the causal relationships behind them — for example, how improvements in conversion rate statistically correlate with churn, support tickets, or GGR.
Where experience intelligence makes the biggest impact is when UX teams align their KPIs to revenue levers. That might mean identifying the 2–3 sub-metrics (e.g. bet slip completion rate, deposit success rate, or onboarding drop-off) that most strongly predict business performance — and focusing design efforts there.
In practice, that creates a simple prioritisation engine. Every UX initiative becomes measurable, testable, and justifiable. Changes can be forecasted, experimented on, and then tied back to outcomes the board actually cares about.
Where it gets ignored is when UX sits in isolation — disconnected from product strategy and commercial ownership. The most successful teams break down those silos and build performance around shared metrics, shared language, and shared impact."
Gaming Eminence: iGaming teams often move quickly and rely heavily on instinct, particularly around promotions, UX tweaks, or onboarding changes. How do you think leaders should balance intuition with structured experience intelligence without slowing teams down?
FD: "Instinct is part of the game — and in a fast-moving space like iGaming, it’s a genuine strength. The issue is when untested assumptions become the foundation of strategy.
At DAZN, we ran hundreds of experiments a year — and only around 30% of them produced the outcome we expected. That’s the reality of product instinct: it’s directionally useful, but often wrong in the details.
The key isn’t to replace intuition — it’s to surround it with fast validation.
That’s why we focus so heavily at Jurnii on enabling rapid feedback loops. Experience intelligence should not be a blocker; it should be a real-time, lightweight checkpoint that teams can use to test hypotheses, benchmark against norms, and move forward with confidence.
And when teams don’t have to spend weeks buried in analysis or waiting for quarterly reports, something interesting happens — they start thinking more strategically and creatively. Fast feedback frees up thinking.
In short: move fast — but measure. Intuition is the engine, but it should always be validated and tested. No one is ever right 100% of the time."
Gaming Eminence: From what you’ve seen across different igaming products and markets, what do operators most consistently underestimate about player experience — not in theory, but in how it actually shows up day-to-day for users?
FD: "Operators consistently underestimate how fragile user trust and intent are — especially in the earliest moments of a session.
Most platforms are losing users not because of a major bug or feature gap, but due to a slow drip of minor UX violations that chip away at confidence. Confusing copy. Slow feedback. Unclear errors. Unkept promises. These compound quickly.
The most common blocker we see? Unmet expectations. There’s often a sharp disconnect between what a user expects — shaped by an ad or promo — and what the experience actually delivers.
And because users rely on established UX patterns — intuitive button placement, progress indicators, mobile responsiveness — even small deviations introduce doubt. And doubt kills conversion.
We see the same five friction points repeatedly:
Setting Clear Expectations: Users disengage when they aren’t sure what to expect next — or feel they’ve been misled. Example: An ad promises “Instant Bonus”, but after registering, users discover they must deposit and wager before qualifying. That disconnect breaks trust and kills conversion.
Design for Fast Failure Recovery: Everyone makes mistakes. But many platforms fail to help users recover quickly — especially in moments like deposit or signup.
Example: A user attempts a deposit and sees a vague error: “Something went wrong. Please try again later.” No explanation. No support. No next step. Most users won’t try again.
Relevant and Targeted Journeys: Too many operators still serve generic journeys — regardless of where a user came from, what they clicked, or what they want.
Example: A user clicks a social ad promoting boosted odds for a Champions League match. After registering, they’re redirected to a casino homepage — not the betting market they came for. The intent is broken, and so is the conversion.
Seamless and Fast Micro-Interactions: In gaming, milliseconds matter. Every action — from tapping a button to switching tabs — must be immediate, responsive, and reassuring.
Example: A player taps “Place Bet” during a live match. The button greys out with no feedback. They refresh the page, get logged out, and miss the market entirely. All from a single broken interaction.
Unified Ecosystem: Siloed systems lead to inconsistent UX. We see platforms where marketing, product, CRM, and support don’t speak to each other — and users suffer for it.
Example: A player completes KYC on mobile, but is asked to repeat the process on desktop due to a disconnected verification system. It creates friction, frustration, and unnecessary drop-off."
