Website & User Engagement
Kindred / 32Red — 6 months — 2024
⚠ Some visuals are restricted or anonymised due to ongoing NDA obligations.
📣 Challenges
It's very hard to change when you have a winning product — but not every starting eleven lasts forever and change needs to happen. Despite being robust, mature and capable of handling many complexities of day-to-day iGaming operations, the existing front-end platform works with older technologies, preventing innovation, technical advancements, UX improvements and performance gains.
Creating a new casino website means navigating challenges unique to the iGaming landscape: an extensive portfolio of over 2,000 games across providers, a constant stream of CRM strategies and daily promotions, plus stringent regulatory compliance requirements.
We strive to create a platform, framework and language that transcends mere functionality — a harmonious blend of security, innovation and an immersive gaming environment. Striking that perfect equilibrium means robust security measures while ensuring players feel not just secure, but at ease and engaged throughout their entire experience.
🎯 Objective
- Redesign the existing website and client-facing operations of 32Red online casino entirely, to be released progressively across different markets.
- Create a new visual language and component library for the brand.
- Further sustain growth, increasing acquisition, engagement and retention.
- Integrate previous learnings for compliance, player safety and affordability into the casino ecosystem, keeping the player at the forefront of every change.
- Increase functionality for game discovery, banking and real-time events integration into website real estate and promotions.
🏆 Final Results
🥋 My Role
Led a team of 2 Researchers, 4 Product Designers and 2 Content Designers/IA. Fostering a collaborative and hands-on culture, we held regular Dailies, Weeklies and Retrospectives for general oversight, feedback and to ensure everything was progressing — this was a marathon, not a sprint, and spirits needed to be kept high throughout.
Set initial meetings with stakeholders and different teams to understand the challenge, scope and requirements. Defined research goals and methodologies ahead of time to inform decision-making early in the process. Aligned goals and timelines to meet with broader organisational objectives.
Established the holistic architecture of this behemoth and mapped the key user journeys, and led creation of the design system that supports the whole user-centric experience. Regular catchups with key stakeholders and teams ensured collaboration, alignment and coordination — delivering key parts of this enormous puzzle while confirming tests were on the right track.
Presented final deliverables to stakeholders, development and other relevant teams for final release and in company-wide events. The project successfully encapsulated strategic planning, iterative design processes and effective collaboration.
📑 Methodology
While initial definition meetings were ongoing, and with the main objective in sight, we rolled our sleeves — based on learnings from previous projects, we started with a blank canvas exercise about what the finest casino experience would look like, laying ideas down and running early design exercises.
After initial meetings and interviews with different teams, stakeholders and players, we started defining our roadmap and tasks — from research to design and architecture — to get ahead of the game. Work began immediately on the design system and visual language, so the team was quickly producing mockups, prototyping and proactively reaching out across teams at every step.
For months it was business as usual, until the final delivery stages arrived — on time. We handed deliverables together with a research plan and continued test plan to ensure the new website and features behave as expected, with new features introduced regularly.
🧠 Retrospective & Learnings
Despite the recent release, early adoption signals across various fronts are extremely positive. During different stages of testing with real users and colleagues across the business, everybody was unanimous in indicating a high level of satisfaction with the new design and user experience, together with a very high score in terms of business value.
Fostering a collaborative and hands-on culture proved effective — teams proactively reached out during the duration of the project, ensuring alignment and coordination, with happy stakeholders throughout. Laying a path for the future was also part of it; we will continuously monitor the performance of the new website to ensure it aligns with expectations and introduces new features regularly.
The blank canvas exercise done early in the project, together with a summary of previous learnings, set us ahead of the game — with clear ideas, priorities and a defined roadmap, we were set for success.
📌 Features
The features of the new casino are designed to enhance the user experience, provide personalised interactions and offer a diverse, engaging gaming environment. Segmentation, gamification and customisation play a crucial role in tailoring the experience to individual preferences.
- New Design System and language based on new brand identity guidelines.
- New casino layout and templates — multi-platform, multi-language, multi-locale, multi-currency.
- Deep SEO features built in from the ground up.
- Personalised user profiles with preferences, gaming history and favourite games.
- Exclusive perks, bonuses and rewards based on user activity, achievements and loyalty.
- Social features allowing users to connect, share achievements and engage in friendly competition, with seamless cross-platform play.
- In-built segmentation and server-side A/B testing for enhanced optimisation.
- Personalised game favourites list with smart recommendations.
- Customisable dashboard with widgets for preferred game categories, promotions and account information.
- Tailored promotions and bonuses based on user behaviour, preferences and player segments.
- Advanced filtering options for game categories, providers and features to enhance game discovery.
- Real-time notifications about promotions, new game releases or personalised offers.
- Real-time events, tournaments and leaderboards to enhance engagement.
- Better and Safer Gambling: deposit/loss/wager limits, and self-exclusion tools promoting responsible gaming.
- Personalised support based on user history and preferences.
🔧 Tools
User Zoom · User Testing · Optimizely · Adobe Analytics · Snowplow · Google Analytics · Figma · Miro · Confluence · JIRA · After Effects · HTML & CSSThank you for reading! ❤️
