User Onboarding & Dashboard

📣 Context

UK gambling regulation changes every year, often with complex requirements and short deadlines. In 2023 the key journeys (registration, log-in, forgotten password) needed many more checks to protect players' identities and the source of their funds.

The risk was obvious: every new check is a reason to give up halfway through registering. The business needed the checks and the conversion, and players needed to feel protected rather than buried in requests.

🏆 Outcomes

Measured over 2023–24.

🥋 My Role & the Team

I led the team and split it into three streams: acquisition & retention, safer gambling & responsible gaming, and the new account dashboard.

I owned the system architecture and the journey map, set the research plan with research and content, and agreed requirements, priorities and roadmaps with stakeholders and the delivery teams, clearing blockers before they slowed the work down.

🧭 Key Decisions

• Secure where it matters, light everywhere else. We placed each new check where it actually protects the player, and kept every other step as short as possible.
• Map every journey before designing a screen. I mapped the whole system first (registration, log-in, recovery, verification, account), which set the priorities for the MVP and for the releases after it.
• Show players their own numbers. The new dashboard puts the account, document requests, spend and limits in one place, in real time, so players can answer their own questions. Support contacts about banking and limits fell by 52%.
• Build for the next regulation, not just this one. The system is modular, so operators can change player-facing steps and content with minimal delivery time when the rules change again.

👥 How I Led It

We started with the existing ecosystem: interviews with internal teams, stakeholders, and both long-time and new players. Those findings became the first maps, flows and information architecture, then prototypes and the visual identity for the new registration and dashboard.

Seven teams shaped the work as it happened, not after it: Development, Data & BI, Compliance & Player Safety, CRM, SEO & Acquisition, Customer Support and Sustainability. Workshops and presentations ran throughout, so every team saw progress and could shape it, compliance included.

🖼️ What Shipped

• New registration, log-in and forgotten-password journeys, with verification and source-of-funds checks built in and explained in plain language.
• A real-time account dashboard: account status, document requests, spend and limits.
• One home for safer-gambling tools and content.
• Messaging managed in the CMS from the first touchpoint (organic, paid, affiliates, CRM), with segmentation and server-side A/B testing built in.
• The foundations of a dark theme for every product and platform.

🧠 Takeaways

• Compliance is a design input. Brought in early, it shapes a better journey; brought in late, it breaks one.
• What I'd do differently: more user testing, earlier, with tighter feedback loops on the key journeys, and the sustainability and customer measures integrated from the start instead of alongside.