UX design in iGaming isn’t just about speed and slick visuals. It’s increasingly where the battle between engagement and ethics is fought. From payment flows to spin buttons, the way a game feels can shape how long and how much someone plays. Yet most studios have little say in how their games are used within the wider player journey. That disconnect is growing harder to ignore.
As responsible gambling expectations shift from slogans to systems, the question isn’t just how to reduce harm. The question is whether the UX itself can become a form of protection.
Helen Walton, Chief Commercial Officer at G.Games, advocates for putting ethics at the core of product design. She argues that ethical UX in iGaming must be a deliberate, strategic pillar for the industry—an essential practice, not merely a compliance afterthought.
“Studios do not have a big say in this normally,” she tells SiGMA News. “The biggest suppliers get involved over mandating position and visibility for particular offers, but that is rarely about improving flow for the player!”
Studios and the UX illusion
This lack of control for studios exposes a bigger problem: while operators shape the overall player journey, studios are restricted to the game interface. Yet, as Walton points out, the interface holds immense influence over player choices and welfare—and is never truly neutral. This disconnect makes it harder for the industry to design games that truly meet responsible gambling standards.
“Anticipation is a crucial part of gameplay,” Walton notes.
Friction, flow, and the Candy Crush principle
“The question is when friction is useful,” Helen explains.
“Take Candy Crush — the pauses before buying lives or asking friends for help aren’t flaws. They’re deliberate points of friction that slow the user down just enough to reframe their intent. In gambling, that kind of design could be used to promote responsibility, not just monetisation.”
But friction doesn’t happen in a vacuum. How and where it appears often reflects the business model beneath it. For game suppliers, every design choice must also serve the purpose of commercial survival. In games of chance, survival often shapes intent. And that intent is rarely neutral.
Some operators have begun testing friction as a protective tool. Kindred, for instance, has trialled real-time messaging based on behavioural data, pausing sessions when players show signs of elevated risk. It’s not a silver bullet, but it shows how ethical UX in iGaming can work in tandem with responsible gambling principles, not just monetisation.
Misaligned incentives and the RG blind spot
“Suppliers are paid on revenue share,” Walton says.
“While an operator doesn’t care which of hundreds of games a player plays as long as they stay on site, for a studio, only their own games matter, and they don’t much care on which operator a player plays.”
This dynamic causes conflicting motivations. Volatility, burn rate, RTP, loyalty mechanics, and session persistence serve as both creative and commercial strategies. Regulators caution against features that encourage loss chasing, but enforcement is often vague.
In the UK, however, some regulatory shifts have started to reframe design expectations. The Gambling Commission has introduced measures such as autoplay bans, stake-level prompts, and financial vulnerability checks for players spending more than £150 per month.
The ecosystem is shifting toward safer design, but the people who build the games still don’t have a proper seat at the table. Still, progress is being made. The UK’s updated regulations now include minimum game design standards, nudging suppliers closer to the heart of responsible product delivery.
These design tensions have real-world impact. The UK’s 2024 Gambling Survey suggested that 2.7 percent of adults fall into the highest-risk gambling category, a group marked by significant harms and classified as problem gamblers. Stability in the figures shouldn’t mask the deeper cost: fractured families, hidden debt, and lives lived in quiet distress.
As session length and spending behaviours become more tightly engineered through UX, design choices must be viewed through a responsible lens, not just a revenue one.
“How this is interpreted is very dependent on a subjective point of view.”
Walton sees the ethical terrain shifting far beyond old-school slots. Today’s stickiness often comes gift-wrapped — missions, unlockable reels, layers that nudge players to stay just a bit longer. Clever? Absolutely. But pressure can wear many faces and invite scrutiny over how persistence is rewarded.
“It’s probably most relevant in innovations where commercial requirements must be balanced against possible concerns around increasing bet size or length of session,” she notes. “But it’s hard to answer definitively as a supplier.”
Streamers, RTP, and the ethics of performance design
Even when it comes to defining ‘good UX in iGaming’, operators and studios aren’t always aligned.
“For a studio, the basics matter enormously. Is the spin button prominent, easy to use, and intuitive? Does the slot resize effortlessly across devices? Do all regulatory elements fit without cluttering the screen?” Walton asks.
“Neither studio nor operator really wants the player returning to the lobby, since that’s often a key chance to end the session. On a seven-minute mobile session, switching games stops GGR optimisation — that’s Gross Gaming Revenue, the metric used to track total player spend before payouts.”
The pressure to optimise has only grown with the rise of streamer-driven engagement. Games are increasingly designed for watchability as much as playability. This trend raises challenges about the balance between entertaining an audience and preserving player agency. Could prioritising viewer entertainment diminish the player’s control or experience?
“From a UX point of view, the key thing here is being pushed to deliver a desktop version just for streamers,” she says. “But I think game feature choices can be more ethically dubious than UX design ones.”
She points to recent reports of streamers playing on higher RTP versions than the public.
“That’s definitely unethical in my view.”
While providers often offer several RTP settings per title, there is no public evidence confirming streamers receive preferential configurations, though the ethical debate continues. Helen adds:
Is there an important difference between what streamers want to show – the big wins and most volatile features, and the actual gameplay required to get there in jurisdictions where something like a Bonus Buy is not permitted? Does this set up a misalignment between expectation and reality, thus creating an extra temptation that leads towards the unregulated market?
Redefining UX for mobile-first play
And when asked what one UX in iGaming habit the industry should scrap or rethink? Beyond ethics, one of the industry’s most persistent UX challenges is purely practical, making legacy designs fit modern devices.
“Making the traditional 5×3 slot shape work for mobile portrait view still has a way to go,” Walton says. “There have been various experiments, but no one has cracked a permanently better layout.”
Her final reflection ties back to the structural issue that sparked our conversation, underscoring the profound interconnectedness of UX, innovation, and industry roles.
“This isn’t exactly UX,” she says, “but the separation between operator and supplier can definitely be damaging to innovation and player experience. You’d think operators with in-house studios would have perfected this by now. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.”
As long as suppliers are excluded from the bigger picture, player protection risks being reactive and shallow. If the industry is serious about safer journeys, it needs to treat studios as architects, not afterthoughts. Because in design, the blueprint always matters.
Step inside the world’s biggest iGaming community. Join HERE for weekly updates from the world’s iGaming authority and unlock subscriber-only offers.
