The part of the poker client that generally gets the least attention may actually be the most important.

Of course, this was just the first iteration, and it was over a quarter of a century ago. Two decades after Planet Poker arrived, Party announced that 'totally revamped' lobbies were officially a 'major focus'. That major focus led to... tables. Under some tabs (aka table filters). Two decades! To basically replicate a website. In some cases they probably spent significant engineering time building the equivalent of a proprietary browser engine to render it. This is par for the course with overhyped announcements about trivial poker client updates - this is Kindred, probably trying to hit an investor document word count, noting that they are 'designing features to avoid free text becoming too emotional' by using a 'library of animated memes and emoticons'. Exciting!

It would be somewhat churlish to criticise the poker client designers for this de facto standardisation. If you accept the current online poker orthodoxy, there is little wiggle room here, especially if the primary (unwritten) requirements to 'allow customers to pick from a range of different poker table games'. Some people will point to the the imposed complexity of regulatory rules, but it is really about two decades of technological development meeting the seemingly immovable object of the only customer cohort you really care about becoming attuned to a specific UI workflow. I doubt that any members of a poker room team have woken up one Monday morning, thrown off their rake table covered duvet, and exclaimed, Jerry Maguire style, 'Today I am going to propose a radical departure from the accepted norms for the lobby as it will be an exciting all-in bet on my job!'

The problem with that approach is that it significantly reduces the competitive terrain. Now you have to overtake whichever company is currently mining the very very very grey markets based on your unique ability to customise the colour of the virtual table felt. Emoticons allows Kindred to add a few 'better add something about poker' lines to their end of year report, and implementing and blogging about similar things evidently keeps some people at Entain partly employed, but the question 'how can this possibly turn us into the leader in the poker category?' is the elephant in the room.

The mistake here would be to think that the problem/opportunity is a UI issue, resolved with a swipe of an artistic brush. It is actually a business model issue. The lobby is fundamentally a routing product with a secondary role of status. It is routing in that it helps players move to different product areas with more or less efficiency. Sometimes this aspect can be considered agnostic from an operator perspective (although the commercial importance of cross selling means that this is less true now than a decade ago), but often it is an explicit choice. Status, in the current setup, is a minor concern - often as insignificant as a number representing your bankroll. If you stop presenting customers with a slightly curated list of revenue-generating options, the balance shifts. Now, you can optimize for pathways — ideally ones that adapt dynamically. Status becomes much more important, reflecting a more complex customer journey. In this model, tables become a hindrance, so you can eliminate pointless scrolling.

As unpoker is not a poker product we have a bit of an advantage here - we don't need to follow some norms that were seemingly hard coded decades ago. Like a traditional poker site we have different games, but in most instances they would not exist in a structure that would benefit from a tabular presentation. The lobbies of unpoker implementations will ultimately more closely reflect the thematic structure rather than the product one, in line with a horizontal approach. As these lobbies are driven more by code than graphics, there are new opportunities for optimization—similar to how Netflix personalizes artwork. The core principle is simple. To better guide players, remove or hide unnecessary complexity. Make it easier for customers to find what they need.

Many software products are shaped by a dominant UI model that lasts for years. Sometimes, there are big leaps—like moving from Yahoo-style listings to Google’s search box. Even email clients, which have clear boundaries, have evolved over time. Lobbies should have been redesigned into something more compelling and effective, not just the product of a spreadsheet-brained designer’s imagination.