Mobile-first design has changed every area of the market, from app or site navigation to the colours, fonts and logos or the way games are organised and showcased. Modern online casinos borrow from streaming platforms, financial tech apps and video games, presenting an entertainment experience that is more familiar and mainstream than the old-school gambling aesthetics of early online casinos.
Colour palettes and logos Have got subtler, calmer and less 'Las Vegas'
The rise of mobile-first design also influenced aesthetics. App stores encouraged homogenisation and simplification of design choices to create familiarity between different products, and the design choices of the hugely popular apps began to filter down to the rest.
Casinos of the 2000s and early 2010s looked much brighter, busier and more chaotic than they are today. Glaring bright reds, oranges, golds and greens were not uncommon, and gambling imagery like showers of gold coins and jackpot alarms were used regularly.
You do still see this in games. But, in general, European-facing online casinos and even payment providers like PayPal have become much more muted aesthetically over the last decade.
One great example of this is Ireland's biggest gambling operator Paddy Power, now part of Flutter Entertainment. Paddy Power's signature emerald green has been toned down in brightness over the years and its current logo uses cleaner typography with a unified branding across all its products.
Mobile first architecture has spread to desktop design
In 2016, 71% of UK adults owned a smartphone, up from around 65% in 2015. For context, 10 years later that sits at 95% to 97% according to most studies. Around that time, smartphones overtook desktop computers as the most common method of internet access.
That massive change had a lot of effects on the online casino business. Operators could see the writing on the wall, and began to understand that existing desktop-focused designs accessed through a mobile browser were just not going to cut it.
Operators began introducing casino apps and updating their mobile websites with features from them, such as:
• Large cards for game thumbnails, with animated previews
• Infinite scrolling rather than numbered pages
• Persistent navigation bars or collapsible menus
• Quick deposit menu access
While at first changes were often confined to dedicated apps, after years of mobile first design even customers on desktop or laptops began to prefer these UX choices. So, casinos began making it the standard across desktop and mobile. That choice was prescient as by 2017, more than half of online gamblers in the UK were using mobile devices. That was up from around 41% in 2015.
Games are organised more like streaming platforms
Early casino platforms would display games in a huge grid, often alphabetised. Their would be some categories in a top menu bar, such as slots or blackjack, but that would be it. By the mid 2010s, top operators had figured out players like to see sorting functions, search bars and other ways of finding games.
However, it wasn't until the massive rise of streaming platforms like Netflix that the next big design change would come. Although they had already added smaller thumbnails and endless scrolling, the late 2010s casinos were moving on from the grid entirely and debuting horizontal scrolling carousels.
These could be almost infinitely customised, leaning into the increasing spread of data analytics driven personalised content feeds. One row of games could be labelled Recommended for You, another New Games, and another Popular Games, for example.
On the other hand, most Netflix account holders know about scrolling the carousel for far too long and eventually not watching anything. That's called the paradox of choice.
For this reason, and others, online gamblers often turn to expert reviewers to help them find specific games or developers offered by casinos before they even sign up. For example - according to casino.org's data their top 10 casinos for slots in Ireland each have 3000+ titles to choose from. Let alone live casino and virtual table games. Players therefore use comparison sites to assess casino slot collections, as well as bonuses and the general user experience, so they can make more informed decisions about where to play.
Bonuses are more clearly presented, casinos have added daily rewards
Speaking of bonuses, the way casinos design and present their promotional offers has also changed.
Casino bonuses have evolved through gamification, much like many modern entertainment and consumer products. Daily login rewards like bonus wheel spins, missions and progress bars are now commonplace at casinos when barely any would have had them in 2016.
This has meant terms and conditions need to be displayed as persistent UI elements rather than in one static big block of text.
A decade ago, the majority of casino offers' terms and conditions were buried in the small print and sometimes even difficult to find. Customer demands and regulatory requirements mean this is much less common today.
Although terms and conditions and small print are still needed legally, casino operators tend to offer simplified or concise versions displayed for players via pop outs or in other easily-visible places.