Design and ideation of Fairplay Casino

Executive summary

Fairplay Casino has been active in the Netherlands through physical branches for over 35 years. When the company decided to move into online gambling, they needed to build their digital platform from scratch. I joined as Lead UX Designer on a two-year contract, initially as the sole designer, to take the product from zero to a fully launched online casino - licensed, compliant, and ready for Dutch players.

The brief

The task was to design the full MVP for the online casino - account creation, payments, casino lobby, live casino, bonuses, wagering, responsible gambling tools, creation of account, KYC verification and all cases plus emails, Bonus display and information… and everything in between.

My role

I started as the sole designer on the project. As the product grew in scope, I built and led a team of one senior and two junior designers, working alongside five developers and two project managers across CRM, Marketing, and product verticals.

As Lead UX Designer my responsibilities covered the full design lifecycle - from early discovery and wireframing through to high-fidelity UI and developer handoff. This included:

• Defining the overall UX strategy and design direction
• Building and maintaining a design system used across the platform for all device types
• Setting design standards, running reviews, and keeping the team aligned
• Facilitating stakeholder workshops and translating business requirements into design decisions
• Owning the end-to-end user flows across all product areas
• Collaborating and mentoring designers
• Providing design feedback and supporting junior designer in their tasks
• Collaborating with legal, compliance, CRM, and marketing teams
• Writing and managing UX copy across the platform, with legal sign-off from the team in Kerkrade

What we built

The platform launched with a complete casino product: account creation and KYC flows, payment integration with iDEAL and other Dutch-market methods + classic payment methods (Skrill, PayPal, Credit cards etc), casino lobby with slot thumbnails and game interactions, live casino with table layouts and provider views, a bonus system including welcome bonus and wagering logic, responsible gambling tools, and CRM and marketing surfaces.

I designed the low-fidelity prototype that shaped the initial product architecture, and drove the platform through to a high-fidelity MVP ready for development. We used mobile first approach for all designs.

Micro-animations

Micro animation in casino is a functional layer that guides behaviour and communicates status. I designed and spec’d all micro-animations myself, handing detailed motion specifications to developers for implementation.

Key areas included drawing player attention to available bonuses at the right moment, guiding users through the sign-up and identity verification flows with motion cues that reduced drop-off, communicating KYC status and reminders without interrupting the experience, and prompting account balance top-ups at contextually relevant points.

On-screen messaging

Online casinos operate under strict regulatory requirements, which means on-screen messaging carries legal weight as much as UX weight. I wrote the copy for the majority of messages across the platform, with all content reviewed and approved by the legal team in Kerkrade before shipping.

Message types I designed and wrote included responsible gambling warnings and limit notifications, bonus activation and wagering requirement messages, KYC verification status updates, and account and payment confirmations.

Live casino and game surfaces

Designing table views and provider integrations required close collaboration with third-party suppliers and their assets, and the development team to balance visual consistency with technical constraints. Casino thumbnails and game card interactions across the lobby took special attention as these are high-frequency touch points that directly affect player engagement and navigation.

Outcome

Fair Play Casino went live for Dutch players following receipt of a license from the Dutch Gaming Authority in October 2021. The platform launched as a full-featured online casino - built on two years of design work, from the first sketch to a live, regulated product in one of Europe’s most tightly governed online gambling markets.