Delivering Relevant Content Across Slower Networks Without Compromising the Experience

Industry:	Sports Betting and iGaming
Client since:	October 2020

Services used

Application Development Experience Design

Background

Goat Interactive wanted to improve the user experience for their African sports betting customers. In Africa the majority of their users are accessing the websites via older Android mobile phones using Edge, 2G and 3G networks, where speed is much slower when compared to experience of European customers. Goat Interactive reached out to Symphony as a company with a proven track record for delivering high quality, performant solutions in the iGaming market and a background in building excellent online experiences.

Client

GOAT Interactive is a brand new and separate business in the Editec Group and its objective is to harness and supercharge the power of its partners' brands. It will use its experience, knowledge and passion to position the brands as a different type of betting proposition in their markets; one with a clear meaning and a consistent and evolving benefit to their customers. By fusing the worlds of football and betting, it will create an authentic community of football fans who love the thrill of the bet. Unique and deeply integrated partnerships with world renowned football club brands will give their brands new meaning and association and will be the vehicle to bring fans closer to the clubs, leagues and sport they love.

Challenge

The main challenge was in delivering relevant content across slower networks yet still ensuring that the solution delivers an engaging customer experience. In addition, the solution needed to be flexible so that it could adapt to changing business needs in the mid-term to long-term future. It should also be possible to be delivered for different countries, which have the specific set of functionality, languages, currency and brands availability. Future challenge will be supporting Opera Mini browser on low end devices.

Solution

Based on the requirements received, Symphony Solutions team set out to work on developing the following:

A new website for the sports betting market.
A new CMS to service this website. Both these were done within our core iGaming software development services.
A new Devops pipeline to create/manage the codebase for the CMS and the website.
Infrastructure and tooling to support the above. All done within the scope of our DevOps development services.

CMS and the website should take into account future business requirements and support multiple languages (English, French, Portuguese and Swahili), currencies, brands, and partners. Additionally, it should support the ability to customise the layout and offering of the front-end sites to more localised content depending on the market.

Taking into account project’s requirements and specificity, Google Cloud Platform was chosen as a cloud provider. Developments costs, and GCP’s strong features such as CDN network, vendor support, performance, and horizontal scaling were among the main decision factors.

To deal with performance stability, our engineers implemented the following solutions:

Caching of requests on front and backends.
Rendering optimization on frontend.
All bundles, 3rd party scripts are lazy-loaded.
All components, which are not on the main screen, are lazy-loaded as well.
Reaсt library (136Kb) replaced by Preact library (16Kb).
Budgets are set, which gives a possibility to see and control all the bundle changes (styles, scripts).
Configured Сloudflare optimization settings and cache policies.

They are able to understand the requirements and have a proven record in building applications in this area.

MOHIT CHADDAH, CTO OF Goat Interactive

Result

The output of the first phase will be the new sportsbook with UX made specifically for African market that will go live for one key African country first. The main goal for the next phases will be to deliver this brand-new application for 20 more countries and expanding the functionality with exciting new features.