User Report
The objective of the task was to perform contextual inquiry at the operator's side
situation
The aim was to observe how end-users went about doing their jobs, identify pain points and suggest improvements.
task
I conducted this on-site visit to do a contextual inquiry across all products in the casino management apps for 2 operators.
action
I analysed them and created a detailed report of 160 pages that illustrated user personas, goals and tasks, step by step documentation of their daily tasks and for each step identified pain points and suggested areas of improvement. The pain points included not just usability issues, but feature and performance issues as well. In addition it created a detailed workflow diagram of how they worked across different applications including other 3rd party apps. It was well received by upper management and used as a reference material for all projects in the business vertical.
What is contextual inquiry?
It is to observe the end users in their natural settings to gather rich insights into their context of use. Data from such a study can be used in major innovations to bring about a product change.
Process
I spent 2 weeks at each operator's side visiting each department and sat next to each user while they were working and took lots of notes.
User persona
User persona
User workflow
User workflow step by step
Learning from user visits
End users have specialized jobs and they have a learning curve associated with their jobs. Their job is dependent on using these applications more efficiently. They have to perform the same tasks on the app several times a day. A key goal while designing enterprise apps is to remove redundancies to optimize task flows.
Users multi-tasked across 5-10 different apps to routinely perform their daily tasks. Each user devised unique work-arounds to achieve optimal performance. They had customized setup of apps on each monitor and worked fast across them. Their finger memory guided them as to how many alt tabs were needed to get to a specific app. They developed routine ways to moving from one app to another.
Due to lack of inter-app communication, a lot of copy -pasting was done that caused duplication of effort.
Small interactions affected performance of the end users in a big way. A simple example where we changed scroll to pagination to save dev and performance effort turned out to be massively inefficient for the end users. Each user had to scroll through 20 pages to make selection as opposed to doing all at once if it were all in one page with a scroll. It increased the task completion time by 6 minutes.
I learnt how information flowed across the various applications from one user to another and latency played a big role. For example one department types out of note that reflects with latency in the other department and causes miscommunication.
Even though enterprise apps are data-intensive load times can play a critical role in the design of the UI. We had to reduce the visuals in our dashboards and made it text based.
Even though backoffice apps are form-based users want users to fill in minimal info and still accomplish their objective.
rESULT
It was well received by upper management and used as a reference material for all projects in the business vertical.
Additional Reading
About Casino Management Suits of Apps
Back office apps are a whole suite of apps to manage player experience in the casino. We sell these apps to customers who we call operators. These apps are used by departments at the operator side. There are around 20 of these apps that can on a high level be classified as player rewards and personalization, banking, customer support and land-based.
Player promotions and Personalization
Looking at player promotions and personalization, these are a set of configuration apps that allow operators to create a personalized experience for the player in the casino.
There is a workflow type application that allows operator to configure end to end player journey. This app listens to player driven events and responds with pre-configured actions like messaging the player, rewarding the player with free games, bonuses and loyalty points, and moving the player from one segment to another.
Messaging is a new app being built to personalize messages going to players. Currently player sees limited options of in-client rich media messaging across 14 languages.
Then there are reward systems that encourage players to continue playing at the casino as well as to promote certain games to the players.
Free games is the most popular among rewards. Here a player can play for free for a certain number of spins on a specified game without any risk to his gaming account balance. The operator can configure free spins with pre-determined bet sizes to curb the cost of the offer while still offering a large number of free spins.
Next is the loyalty system, here the player accumulates loyalty points by playing in the casino. Operators can configure different tiers in the loyalty system that have different redeemable options. Each tier also has expiry dates, entry and exit criteria. Operators can also configure loyalty specials that give players double loyalty points to player certain games. This is to essentially promote new games coming into the market.
Next looking at player segmentation, operators can create segments based on key characteristics like what country the player comes from, if he is a high risk, if he has been authenticated by the casino, if he is a VIP, etc. This segments have entry and exit criteria. They have auto-grouping which runs a rules engine based on which players constantly move in and out of the segments based on their actions.
Banking
A casino is no less that a bank. It processes millions of transactions in a day and operates 24/7 365 days a year. Any downtime leads to loss of revenue. On top of that they check to avoid any fradulent transactions and deal with chargebacks. These transactions are essentially deposit and withdrawals.
The deposit app looks at configuring deposit methods for different countries and currencies.
Then there are withdrawal apps that has verifications in place before money is released from the casino.
Then there is an application to route card transactions through payment processors in order to increace acceptance rate and reduce fraud.
Helpdesk
This is a data intensive app used by customer support agents to resolve player queries in the call center.
Landbased
This apps are used to manage the casino floor in a landbased setup. Here the operator can configure casino floor plan, add machines to the floor, add games and promotions to machines and manager the entire setup. It allows monitoring the floor and identifies the hot and cold areas and technical glitches in the machines and take appropriate action.
