Designing a Proprietary Ticket Builder
Simplifying Advanced Horse Racing Wagers for Experienced Bettors
Outcome at a Glance
- Proprietary Ticket Builder experience created
- Reduced dependency on third-party tooling
- Foundation for advanced wagering established
- Executive approval secured
- Internal Design Team validation completed
- Positive feedback from experienced bettors
- Development-ready design system
- 30+ mobile screens delivered
- Responsive desktop adaptation
- Comprehensive edge-case handling
- Full workflow coverage documented
The Challenge
A leading U.S. horse racing platform wanted to replace a licensed third-party Ticket Builder with a proprietary experience integrated directly into its existing mobile and desktop betting apps.
The product needed to support complex multi-race Pick-N wagers while introducing a new A-B-C Tiering System without disrupting habits built by experienced bettors.
Bettors selected horses across multiple races and classified them by confidence: A for strongest opinions, B for secondary contenders, and C for longshot possibilities. The system then generated ticket combinations from those selections — such as all-A combinations or A selections combined with one or more B selections — while keeping the resulting cost visible and adjustable.
The Insight
The primary users already understood betting fundamentals, race strategy, and wagering risk. The learning challenge was the new Ticket Builder workflow and A-B-C system — not betting itself.
That shaped the experience around familiar mental models, progressive learning, transparency, and error prevention.
The core journey
Designing for Expert Users
The experience used familiar racing patterns while keeping sophisticated functionality visible and controllable.
Five Decisions That Shaped the Experience
1. Protect selections when switching modes
Users could accidentally lose selections when moving between ABC and AB. A confirmation step was introduced before switching.
2. Show only valid betting amounts
Invalid betting denominations were hidden dynamically to reduce unnecessary choices.
3. Keep learning available
Instead of making onboarding a one-time experience, the tutorial remained available on demand.
4. Make race navigation faster
Swipe navigation was introduced to support movement between races in a wager sequence.
5. Let users optimize tickets late in the flow
Ticket Review allowed individual tickets to be removed so users could control cost without rebuilding the wager.
From Iteration to Final Solution
The project went through 15+ major iterations, refining the interaction model and visual hierarchy through stakeholder reviews, internal testing, direct feedback from experienced horse racing bettors, and executive reviews.
Across these iterations, the interaction model was refined around the same principle: preserve the depth experienced bettors needed while making the complexity easier to understand and control.
The central direction was consistent: complexity made understandable, not complexity removed.
Final Experience
The final Ticket Builder connected four core views:
Reflection
Designing for experts is not about removing complexity. It's about making complexity understandable.
The deeper UX challenge was translation: turning complex domain logic into an interface language expert users could understand and rely on.
Interested in the long version?
This is the short read. The full case study goes deeper into the business case, the A-B-C constraints, the end-to-end journey mapping, the validation rounds and the roadmap beyond MVP. Email me and I'll send it over.