Outcome
In 2024 the redesigned Sports Corner reached 120K monthly active customers, and 29% of them made a merchant payment within 24 hours of using it. Free to Play reached 293K active customers, with a +2–4% retention lift during peak sporting events.
What Free to Play is
Sports Corner serves Skrill's sports-betting customers: match data, voting, expert facts and tips, inside a regulated payments wallet.
Free to Play is free match prediction inside Skrill’s wallet: people pick outcomes around live fixtures, build progression across competitions and earn rewards for coming back — without leaving the money product to participate.
Sports Corner is the persistent home for that activity; Free to Play is the participation layer that turns a live sporting moment into an immediate reason to act.
Stakes
Before the redesign, Sports Corner sat inside Skrill as campaign-led surfaces — short-lived, event-tied promotions that asked for attention once, then disappeared. Active use was low: enough to show interest, not enough to prove a destination people chose between deposits, withdrawals and transfers.
Payments products are still judged first on trust, speed and clarity. Engagement only earns its place if it strengthens the product without getting in the way of money. Free to Play had to create energy around peak sporting moments without distracting from balances or core wallet actions — and within the same trust and regulatory standards as the rest of the wallet.
We defined success through behaviour signals — active use, retention and stickiness — not launch traffic alone.
- Audience Design for sports enthusiasts as a distinct behavioural segment.
- Trust Keep financial journeys clear and visually dominant.
- Return Measure active use, retention and stickiness after launch.
My role
I was the lead designer on Sports Corner for its first two years, from 2021: I designed the first experience, the behavioural model — discover, participate, return — and the entry points into the wallet, working with Product and Engineering.
From 2023 I managed the designer who carried it forward through the 2024 redesign and the launch of Free to Play. I reviewed the work against the same quality bar as core wallet journeys and made the calls on hierarchy and trust. Where visibility pressure pulled toward louder sports surfaces, I held the money-primary line: engagement could grow, but balances and money actions still had to feel unmistakable.
Who we designed for
Sports enthusiasts were a distinct behavioural segment. Archetypes and job stories kept the work aimed at discover, participate and return — not at a generic campaign audience. We designed primarily for Social- and Entertainment-led behaviours; the Business, profit-primary frame was research context, not the lead experience we built toward.
Decision log
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01
Make Sports Corner a destination, not a campaign
We strengthened the information architecture and visibility of Sports Corner so sports-related activity could live beyond an individual campaign, tournament or match — making repeat behaviour possible by design rather than depending on isolated promotional moments.
The destination in the app: Football, match details, My votes and Games, each one tap apart. -
02
Use live events as the trigger
Sports behaviour is time-sensitive. The most valuable moments sit around live events, competitions and major tournaments, so the experience needed to surface relevant activity when interest was already high.
Free to Play connected those moments with immediate participation — free predictions inside the wallet — reducing the distance between interest and action.
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03
Build a repeat-use loop
One interaction was not enough. Live moments, competitions, progression and rewards had to work together rather than as disconnected promotions.
Live events create a reason to act. Progression creates a reason to return. Repeat play creates habit.
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04
Keep money journeys unmistakable
The sharp trade-off showed up when the business pushed for more sports visibility. A louder Sports Corner might win a campaign moment; it could also bury the balance and the next money action. We kept engagement beside the financial product — clearer hierarchy, predictable actions, understandable navigation — and treated the trust boundary as non-negotiable inside a regulated payments wallet.
Engagement could become more visible. Money still had to feel primary.
Engagement — one product, two behaviours, with money kept primary across the trust boundary. -
05
Judge the work by return behaviour
Clicks and launch traffic can make almost any new feature look successful. We focused instead on whether users came back and whether engagement strengthened during high-interest sporting periods — active users, retention and stickiness as signals of sustained behaviour rather than temporary attention.
From journey to flow to identity
Journey mapping, end-to-end flows and identity work sat alongside the product decisions — shaping how people discovered Sports Corner, how they moved through Free to Play, and how the feature showed up in the brand.
Impact
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120K
Monthly active Sports Corner customers (2024)
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29%
Paid a merchant within 24 hours of using Sports Corner
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293K
Active Free to Play customers (from June 2024)
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+2–4%
Retention during peak Free to Play events
The redesigned Sports Corner dates from December 2023 and Free to Play from June 2024. Figures are from Skrill's 2024 year recap: a payment counts when a customer paid a merchant within 24 hours of using Sports Corner or Free to Play. The retention lift (+2–4%) is measured during peak event windows, so it shows stronger return behaviour, not a lift isolated from the sports calendar.
Taken together, the metrics pointed to people choosing to come back rather than a one-off spike in activity.
What changed
Before
Campaign surfaces
Short-lived, promotional modules inside Skrill — easy to miss between transactions, hard to return to once the campaign ended. Active use stayed low.
After
Destination + loop
A persistent Sports Corner home, with Free to Play predictions, progression and rewards giving people a reason to come back around live moments — without money journeys losing primacy.
Commercial contribution was tracked with Product partners; revenue figures stay out of this public case.
What came next
The destination kept growing after the redesign. League, team and match pages followed in September 2024, odds in December 2024, a reworked voting flow in May 2025 and social voting, with tips and tipsters, in July 2025.
The designers on my team tested social voting with eight participants in unmoderated sessions. Seven of the eight found the best tipsters for a league, but only half found the top tips for a match, and three confused “Winning tips” and “Expert facts” with tips from other users. The navigation held up; the labelling did not, so clearer labels and entry points became the next piece of work.
Reflection
Entertainment inside fintech earns its place when it creates habit without weakening trust: a clear audience, the right moment and a reason to return — with money journeys still unmistakable.
Craft matters, but the question that counted was whether people chose to come back, and whether that behaviour strengthened the product they already trusted.
What remains open is how much of the peak-window lift holds outside major sporting calendars — a measurement question this case does not settle. Next is proving the loop in quieter windows, not only around peak fixtures.