Casino Tournaments
An end to end redesign of multi-platform multi-player online game.
situation
As a team lead, I was required to run with the end to end redesign of Tournaments both player facing and operator facing, spanning multiple business units (games, lobby, back office, Quickfire) across mobile, tablet and desktop.
task
My job was to coordinate with the UX designer and business analyst and provide guidance on the designs.
What are tournaments?
Tournaments is a multiplayer slot game where players compete to get ahead on the leaderboard to win prizes like credits, loyalty points and free spins.
There are two sides of tournaments-
Player facing game
Back office configuration app.
Player Facing
A typical player journey for a tournament is as follows-
Player gets to know about the tournament from a promotion banner in the casino/website. Email is another form of getting to know about tournaments.
Players have to choose and register for a tournament from the lobby. Some factors that they look for while choosing one are- prize pool, entry fee, number of players registered already, base game.
Players are allowed time and coin limits in which they have to spin and increase their winbox (cumulative total of their win amounts).
If players are out of funds, they can choose to rebuy (winbox will reset) or continue (winbox won’t reset, pricier), which gives them additional coins and time to play.
When the tournament ends, players can check their final standing from the lobby.
Back Office Apps
Operators can set up tournaments of their choice depending on their budgets/audience size/type.
The app allows various prize types like cash/bonus credits, free spins, loyalty points or entry into other tournaments.
They can clone popular tournaments and apply the same rules for other games.
OLD aPPLICATION
Player Facing
Players could not find tournaments from the lobby as it was hidden four levels from the first screen.
A lot of tournaments jargon displayed which new players could not make sense of.
Operator facing App
There were too many form elements to fill in order to set up a tournament.
Users had to configure a new tournament from scratch if they had to create a slight variation of an existing tournament.
action
I engaged with product heads of Tournaments from player-facing, operator-facing, traditional and quickfire side. I also met with traditional Operators to understand how they use tournaments and gaps that we can address in the redesign.
I broke the project into traditional and new markets and further by platforms to manage the size of the project and deliverables.
Research
Initial research gave us insights from operator engagement, player engagement, stats, and competitor research.
Competitors Analysis - Modern tournaments had low barrier to entry, tied into loyalty system, short duration and more frequently occurring and measure of wins has more criteria than increasing winbox.
Operator Engagement - They wanted a mobile offering for the player facing and more prize options for back-office.
Player Engagement - More notifications to bring awareness of tournaments as well as keep them information of stages in tournaments when they are playing
Stats - Network games more popular due to bigger prize pool
Player Journey
Player Journey (player decisions) were divided to be for new, casual and regular players
New Players - new player wants low barrier to entry, tournaments should be more visible, ideally should show alongside regular slot listing (thats where most players look for games to play), pushed to the player via SMS, should be able to join with ease - free entry/ enter using loyalty points provide quick tutorial
Casual Players - wants to look for tournaments starting soon, should be able to join with ease - free entry/ enter using loyalty points, tournaments which are related to user's favourite game, big prize pool
Regular Players - has scheduled tournaments to play, have more re-buys and add-ons, looks for his ranking in leaderboard, achieve loyalty points by playing in tournaments, seeking specific tournament type
We also came up with a revised tournament system where players are able to participate in a tournament while playing a normal slot game. Players play with their own balance and win totals are tracked. The criteria of winning could be biggest percentage win over 20 spins. This transforms the tournament system into a promotion type tool that adds incentives to keep players on regular cash slots.
Operator -facing app redesign
We introduced templates to make it easier to set up a tournament.
User could replicate certain details of a tournament like round setup and prize structure to quickly create a new tournament quickly and easily
Player facing redesign
The Mobile platform constitutes more than 70% of our player base. We provided the mobile offering.
We tackled new markets first where we only provide the tournament description and it is embedded in new market's websites.
For the traditional markets, navigation was simplified (1 instead of 4 steps to see tournaments, adding filters and sort),
Information clutter was reduced and
Made to work for both portrait and landscape modes.
Result
Backoffice is complete and in dev. Tournaments FE is nearing completion and will be handed over to tournaments team.
New type of tournaments are being pitched to the execs across all business units for further traction.