A 34% lift in trust perception among tested U.S. players in eight weeks, and 20+ page designs MPL's own engineers built against for the American launch.
MPL, Mobile Premier League, is one of the largest skill-based mobile gaming platforms in its category. Founded in 2018 in Bengaluru, it reports more than 120 million registered players across India, the United States, Nigeria, and Brazil, and more than 60 games spanning fantasy sports, rummy, bingo, and casual titles. It became India's second gaming unicorn in 2021 at a $2.3 billion valuation.
MPL had launched in the United States in 2021, but its web experience was still speaking to the market that made it. It engaged WANDR in early 2025 for one strategic move: making the American entry work. At MPL's scale, that is not a marketing problem. In a category where money changes hands and the law changes at every state line, it is a credibility problem.
The site was built to show games. American Players Came Looking For Proof.
MPL had the product, the players, and the ambition to enter the U.S. What it did not have was a web experience built for the most skeptical consumer market in real-money gaming, where the first questions are about legitimacy and the questions about games come much later, if at all. Six problems surfaced the moment we put the live site in front of American players.
The site mentioned legal compliance but displayed no U.S. gambling licenses, no security seals, no third-party certifications, and no responsible-gaming affiliations. One participant put it plainly: “I wish they had some official gambling licenses or trust badges displayed. I want to know if this site is actually legit before depositing money.”
There were no player reviews, no testimonials, no winner stories, and no visible record of payouts, while processing times, fees, and withdrawal limits went unstated. “There’s no section showing real user reviews or recent winners,” one player said. “How do I know if people actually win and get paid?”
Long paragraphs and heavy text buried the offer, games could not be filtered by type, nothing surfaced what was trending or most played, and the FAQ had no search and no expandable sections. “Way too much text on this site,” one participant said. “I just wanted to see a simple list of games and payouts.”
The main call to action was a QR code in a banner, with no direct button and no plain link for iOS or Android. In a category where players are already scanning for red flags, that reads as one. “It’s weird that there’s no direct download button,” a participant told us. “Makes me question if the app is even safe.”
Online bingo is illegal in ten U.S. states, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Nevada, New York, Oregon, South Dakota, Washington, and Wisconsin, with federal law adding its own layer on top. Terminology, promotions, payment methods, and support hours all read as built for another market too. In this category that gap does not read as a translation issue. It reads as risk.
Drag the handle to see how the landing experience changed, from a games-first page written for an audience that already knew the brand into a credibility-first page written for players deciding whether to trust it at all.
WANDR recruited through the places these players already gather, bingo and gaming forums, Reddit, and Facebook groups, then screened 13 respondents down to the 10 with the most useful mix of casual, regular, and competitive habits. Every one of them had played in the previous three months, and almost every device they named was a phone or a tablet.
The ten who came through were six women and four men across Florida, Ohio, Arizona, California, Texas, Michigan, Washington, Georgia, New York, and Pennsylvania, with one to five-plus years of online play behind them. Each 30-minute one-on-one session followed a discussion guide, pairing an open conversation about the sites they already trust with a live evaluation of MPL’s own.
Across all ten conversations, participants worked the same checklist before a download was even considered: licensing and legal model, security and encryption, transparent odds and payouts, app-store rating and download count, and reviews from people like them. The questions they wanted answered above the fold were blunt ones. Is this legal in my state. Who operates it and where are they based. How fast can I withdraw. How do I know I will actually get paid if I win. Game variety mattered, but only after that list cleared.
We took nine U.S. gaming platforms apart screen by screen, Epic Games, Roblox, Skillz, Activision Blizzard, AviaGames, Papaya Games, Zynga, World Winner, and Playtika, logging good practice and bad on each, then studied the three bingo operators competing directly for these players, Bingo Blitz, Blackout Bingo, and Big Cash. State availability information, an explained legal model, age verification, RNG certification, and visible security signalling were table stakes across the category. MPL surfaced almost none of them.
In the screener, 69.2% named friends or family recommendations and 69.2% named the app store as how they find games worth playing, against 53.8% for advertising and 23.1% for forums and reviews. Word of mouth and store credibility outrank paid acquisition in this audience, which is why social proof was treated as structure in the redesign rather than decoration.
Twenty-eight, Las Vegas, working part time and studying part time, playing on a two-year-old iPhone in the gaps of a long day. Deletes anything that pushes purchases at him or buries him in options, and downloads only what he can try for free first.
Thirty-eight, Atlanta, teaches elementary school, plays across the newest iPhone and a gaming laptop to stay connected with friends and make a little on the side. Will not deposit into a platform whose return is unclear, and abandons any signup that asks for too much up front.
Fifty-four, Grand Rapids, office manager at a local insurance company, mostly on a two-year-old iPad. Comes for the ritual and the room as much as the win, and gets pushed away by bonus terms she cannot parse, chat nobody moderates, and apps her device struggles to run.
Lead with credibility, not game count. The old site led with breadth. The new one leads with licensing, security, and fair-play signals, because that is the barrier standing in front of the first American install.
Split the landing experience by motivation. Casual, competitive, and bingo players do not share a funnel, so each gets copy, imagery, and social proof matched to what brought them.
Give bingo its own landing strategy. It has its own demographic, its own competitors, and its own purchase behavior, and American players compare it to a bingo hall, not to a menu of games.
In a regulated, real-money category, players do not evaluate the platform the way they evaluate a consumer app. They evaluate it the way they evaluate a bank: regulatory visibility first, then fair-play evidence, then payment security, then responsible gaming, then social proof that does not read as marketing.
That sequence is not a content hierarchy, it is a decision sequence, and a page that interrupts it loses the player long before the games get a look. Every design decision was measured against a single question: does this earn a skeptical player's trust in under eight seconds? You cannot retrofit trust into a site that was designed for engagement.
The engagement closed with a complete handoff package: 20+ page designs, the research documentation behind them, the trust architecture, a design system, and an implementation plan ordered by impact. Early testing of the redesigned landing experience against the U.S. persona moved the measures that gate a download.
Figures come from qualitative user testing run during the engagement and are reported as change against the pre-redesign experience; the underlying baseline and end values are not recorded in the research documentation on file. Research figures reflect the delivered scope: 13 screened respondents and 10 in-depth U.S. player interviews, nine gaming platforms and three bingo competitors torn down screen by screen, a state-by-state legal review, three behaviorally grounded personas, and a 19-point gap analysis across six categories. In-market performance validation sat with MPL’s team after handoff.
WANDR rebuilt our U.S. experience around trust as the foundation. Every layer was aligned to reduce uncertainty and let a player decide with full information, and our team came away with a system to execute against without ambiguity.
