BetBreaker
Your Key to Healthy Gambling Habits
The Team
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Problem and Design Overview
Online gambling platforms are highly accessible, appealing, and addictive—especially for college students, who are three times more likely to develop gambling addictions than other U.S. adults. Many young gamblers lack tools to visualize and understand their betting habits, making it harder to recognize harmful patterns. Meanwhile, gambling sites leverage predatory tactics like personalized ads, rewards, and endless play options, encouraging extended engagement and spending. This environment fosters addiction, making moderation or quitting challenging without external support.
BetBreaker is a browser extension that activates when users access gambling sites, offering a discreet but impactful way to track and manage their betting habits. It provides real-time insights into personalized spending limits, betting trends, and risk analysis through clear visualizations. To promote responsible gambling, BetBreaker incorporates a peer accountability system where users approve each other’s bets, fostering mutual support and financial transparency.
Rather than attempting to eliminate gambling addiction outright, BetBreaker aims to cultivate mindfulness, helping users make informed decisions and develop healthier behaviors in an environment designed to exploit impulsivity.
Lack of transparency in gambling websites can lead to emotional issues.
Betbreaker Homepage
Design Walkthrough
The focus tasks we decided to move forward with include "mutual accountability with friends" and "tracking financial responsibility". Our task of mutual accountability with friends encapsulates various methods and mechanisms to hold friends accountable for their betting decisions. By implementing a system of financial and habitual transparency, where community members can approve/deny one another's online bets prior to them being placed, as well as viewing each other's betting histories, our findings have shown that this has perpetuated healthier behaviors and deterred impulsivity amongst our participants.
In terms of our focus task of tracking financial responsibility, our intentions are for BetBreaker to be informative and show full transparency about the spending habits and financial statistics of its users, such that they can make more informed gambling decisions and not incur debt beyond their pre-existing online budgets.
Track Financial Responsibility
As a novice online gambler, one may feel inclined to place financially irresponsible bets, solely based on how lucky and favorable they seem to the bettor. Our design research has shown us that this behavior is perpetuated by a lack of understanding of financial limits, as well as a disregard for the immediate monetary risk associated with high-danger bets. Considering that risky bets are commonly placed during a lapse of judgment over one's finances, BetBreaker aims to address this issue. By providing users with concrete representations of their limits, while also presenting easily digestible financial breakdowns in both graphical and tabular formats, BetBreaker intends to keep users informed throughout their gambling process and mitigate risk.
BetBreaker allows users to see their stats at a glance in the extension.
Users can view their tabular and visual stats.
We also allow users to view their account history within BetBreaker if they choose. For example, if a user is attempting to create a budget, they can review weekly, monthly or yearly breakdowns of their spending, including specific bets that may be significant spending sinks. Users can then use this information to make more informed decisions regarding whether or not it would be intelligent to continue to gamble and wager their remaining budget.
BetBreaker also allows users to look at individual betting stats, as well as their own history.
Users can see more general stats on their account page.
Mutual Accountability with Friends
Within the context of online gambling, accountability is a major issue, as you can do it without showing your face, and within the privacy of your own home, so if the gambler would like, nobody would have to know about the depth of their habits. To alleviate this issue, BetBreaker leverages a social system to keep groups of friends accountable. For the task of keeping friends accountable, participants from our usability and design research tests remarked that being able to communicate with a friend and view their history and statistics would allow them to keep their friends and themselves accountable, with the knowledge that their friends may do the same for them. From inspection based testing, the suggestion of having a bet approval system was also accepted as a means to bolster mutual accountability.
Users can view their friends statuses and most recent bets from the Friends tab.
Users can view more info in their friends' profiles.
One of the parts of this task for the users is being able to view other user's profiles in BetBreaker and view their histories. By navigating to the Friends tab and selecting the friend that the user would like to check up on, the user is directed to the friend's account page, where they can view their friend's visual stats at a glance and can view more concrete data on their history by viewing their friend's full tabular history.
Additionally, users can require certain bets (eg. expensive ones, or ones that exceed their limit) to require approval from their friends. They may send these approval requests directly to their friends, or have them posted to an anonymous board for their friends to decide whether its a good bet to make or not.
Friend's Betting History Screen
Bet Approval Request Screen
Users can send bet approval request directly to friends.
Users can also vote anonymously on friends' bet approvals.
Design Research and Key Insights
The impact we aimed to achieve with our research was to gain a deeper understanding of the psychological drivers and decision-making processes of habitual online gamblers. Specifically, we sought to explore why individuals choose to bet larger sums after "bad bets" and act impulsively when certain bets feel like “locks.” Additionally, we aimed to uncover insights into whether habitual gamblers have a subconscious mental financial limit while gambling—or lack thereof. To achieve this, we conducted our research primarily through interviews with college students who regularly engage in online gambling. These interviews were conversational, allowing participants to freely express their thoughts while following a flexible script. This approach ensured consistency across interviews while encouraging participants to elaborate on their personal experiences and motivations. We decided to use interviews as our design research method, because it allowed us to get important quantitative data about what the participants would look for in our system.
Our interview participants included the following individuals, who we picked because of their gambling history:
Bob: A 20-year-old college student who regularly engages in online sports betting. He frequently places bets on his college football team and professional sports leagues such as MLB, NBA, and NFL. Bob primarily uses Bovada as his betting platform but also utilizes friends who act as bookies, providing alternative betting options.
Even: A 23-year-old college student who engages in online sports betting bi-weekly. He uses multiple betting sites and places parlays on various sporting events.
Ben: A 19-year-old college student who regularly places NFL bets on DraftKings and FanDuel. In addition to NFL bets, he places NBA parlays during the regular season.
These individuals were selected for our interviews because college students make up a significant portion of online gambling platform user bases. Since our interviewees regularly participate in online betting, we believe their insights were critical to achieving our goal of understanding the psychological factors behind gambling. This knowledge helped us design BetBreaker to better cater to the needs of college students themselves.
Counterproductivity in Mental Tracking
When discussing financial habits, our interviewees from our design research expressed reluctance about the idea of physically tracking their data in spreadsheets or other mediums. When asked why they refrain from tracking their finances, one interviewee mentioned that they prefer to keep a mental note of their win/loss data, citing the lack of an easy way to report finances across multiple betting platforms as a significant barrier. Although they fully acknowledged the importance of tracking this information, the interviewees shared that relying on mental tracking has previously led to unnecessary debt.
In our final design, we worked through this by allowing users a direct sync between their finances and the betbreaker website. Though not pictured in our final design, a major part of our thinking for financial tracking on the implementation side involved the use of a virtual credit card, so that users wouldn't have to track it all themselves.
Virtual Credit Card
A Lack of Financial Responsibility
In the interviews conducted with all three college students, a clear trend emerged: a significant lack of financial literacy, particularly in managing money responsibly while gambling. For example, one interviewee mentioned struggling to control his gambling when offered “bonus free bets” on NFL Sundays, as this incentivizes him to gamble more in hopes of winning a larger prize pool. Additionally, some interviewees admitted to struggling with managing their finances during losing streaks. Two interviewees shared experiences of spending hours trying to recover their losses, only to end up losing more money than they could afford.
In our design research this information led to the notification system design that we developed in the early stages of ideation. We used it to display the concept of giving users cautionary nudges and informing them throughout their process. This design was fleshed out, and eventually we merged it with the web extension idea, such that the web extension would also be able to send notifications to the users.
Gambling websites often make it intentionally difficult to find spending amounts or habits.
Societal Factors Impact Gambling Habits
Interviewees also stated that their gambling behaviors are heavily and consistently influenced by peer pressure, as their friends also participate in sports betting. Being part of a gambling community appeared to encourage some interviewees to frequently discuss their gambling strategies in an effort to better understand sports trends. It was critical for us as researchers to recognize that online gamblers are often persuaded by their peers to place certain bets, depending on whether the odds seem favorable. By aligning our design with this insight, we gained a deeper understanding of how to address the smaller-scale "bet or no bet" decision-making process.
In our design process, we worked with this isight and we originally developed a friend leaderboard to encourage friendly competitive engagement. We eventually changed this to a general friends tab to remove any potential competitive shaming that might occur.
Gamblers are often influenced by social factors.
Iterative Design and Key Insights
Our iterative design process was multifaceted and involved significant revisions and changes as we progressed. We began with design research interviews with participants from our target demographic. The purpose of these interviews was to identify the type of overall design users would find comfortable and to determine which functionalities should or should not be included in the system.
Next, we created multiple designs to align with the participants’ desired functionalities. After brainstorming and deliberate selection, we decided on the web extension design. Usability tests via contextual inquiry were then conducted on this design, during which participants were informed about the tasks we wanted them to complete and the context in which they would use our application. These tests prompted revisions after each round, culminating in a refined final paper prototype.
Throughout the usability testing process, we also incorporated heuristic evaluations from our peers to identify specific defects in our product. These evaluations helped us address and revise issues both before and after the usability tests, ensuring a more polished final design.
To start, we created numerous paper sketches, eventually narrowing down and merging designs, fleshing each of them out more, and removing some of the ideas, and eventually deciding on a design before making a prototype. The paper prototype was modified throughout all our usability tests, and after testing, turned into a digital mockup on Figma, which was then also edited via inspection.
Back Buttons and Emergency Exits to "Go Back"
From our heuristic evaluators, we learned that our paper prototype lacked user freedom. For example, it had almost no back buttons, and each tab was hidden within a specific sequence of tasks that users had to complete in the exact order to reach their destination. This issue arose partly due to the clutter of the original web extension and partly because the tasks were designed in isolation.
To address this, we merged all our work to create a cohesive design that allowed cross-functionality between tasks. Additionally, we added emergency exits and back buttons throughout the interface, ensuring users could navigate more freely and recover from errors easily.
Before
After
Friends Leaderboard Converted to a List
One insight we gained from contextual inquiry usability testing was that displaying a leaderboard under certain metrics could convey the wrong message. Initially, we configured the leaderboard to show rankings based on metrics such as win/loss ratio, net winnings, or minimal losses. The intent was to encourage engagement with BetBreaker by leveraging users' competitive nature. However, we discovered that this approach might inadvertently motivate users to bet more in an attempt to climb the leaderboard. Additionally, users at the bottom of the leaderboard could feel unnecessarily shamed, even if they hadn’t done anything wrong.
To address this, we replaced the leaderboard with a "Friends" tab. This non-competitive feature allows users to view their friends’ statuses and most recent bets in a supportive, neutral format, avoiding the pitfalls of competition and promoting a more positive user experience.
Cognitive Issue with Leaderboard
Resolution in Friends Tab
Turning the Web-Extension into a Full Website
During our iterative design process we made heavy use of paper sketching and prototyping. We conducted our usability tests on our paper prototypes, and before making any form of a digital mockup, we would make paper prototypes of the pages or functionalities, and conduct either usability or inspection based tests on these pages, and revise and repeat until we felt comfortable with the design on paper. From this paper prototyping we learned that keeping all of our information within the context of a web extesnion cluttered all the text, and that we needed to expand to a full website alongside the web extension, just because all the writing on the paper was simply so small. To revise this, we decided to migrate the information that was cluttered into a website where there is much more screen/paper space to utilize to display information to the user. While this was a major change to our overall design, the content of our functionalities and tasks was not changed much, but just generally made more visible, now that it was in the frame of an entire website.
Original Paper Prototype
Final Paper Prototype
Final Paper Prototype (2)