Award winner

  • End-to-end

  • Design

  • User Flow

  • 0-1

Project Type

  • UX Manager

  • Lead Designer

My Role

  • User Research

  • Interface Design

  • Stakeholder Management

  • Lead team of 2 UXDs

  • Project Management

Contribution

  • Award winning product at G2E

  • MVP, 0-1 in 6 months

Outcome

Vizexplorer is a B2B casino operations company. Their products span the 3 verticals of casino operations: marketing, slot solutions, and player development.

When I joined in January of 2019, they had an industry leading product that was still built in…FLASH! I was hired to do a couple key items:

  1. Reimagine the entire product line in HTML5/react

  2. Build a slot MVP in time for an October release at G2E (the casino conference)

  3. Build a new campaign manager

  4. Build out a design team

Overview

My Role

As UX Manager, my role was that of player-coach. My primary job was to reimagine, with P&E, the future of the product. In addition to KTLO (keep the lights on) design of their current product, I was tasked with coming up with 2 new MVPs for the slot and marketing verticals.

While that was all going on, we added some more team members to the design team.

Defining the problem

A casino slot floor is like a mall, every square foot is measured by profitability. Therefore, no sqft can be wasted.

Casinos will rearrange their slot floor up to 30% each month, in order to maximize profits. This is done with outdated (usually 30 day old) data and a large use of their “gut.”

There was also no way for a slot floor manager to filter slots by various qualities including: denomination, cabinet, game theme…to name a few.

  • Slot floor managers did NOT have real-time (or near real-time) access to their data

  • There was no current software offering that would allow them to see what slots were the most profitable in a range of domains (cabinet, theme, location, denomination, etc)

  • Every other product was slow and clunky

Problems for users

  • Wanted to expand their slot management offerings

  • Needed to launch a new product asap

  • This product would be the first piece of the reimagining puzzle

Problems for the business

  • Let slot managers see their data in near real-time (updated nightly)

  • Ability to add, remove, move, reconfigure slots based on real comparative data

  • Launch by G2E (Oct. 2019)

Goal

Solutions

Up until I had arrived, the user flow was for a user to open the product, search through a list of poorly named reports, and then “run” the report.

This did not make sense to me, the reports would take anywhere between 20 min to an hour to populate. After much discussion about how this is a poor user experience, I was able to convince Prod. & Eng. that running all of the data overnight was the best solution.

This would allow users to read their data while sipping on a cup of coffee first thing in the morning.

Data in the morning

Compare and link

Now that slot floor managers were able to see their data, for the first time. We wanted to give them the ability to make smart, educated decisions for their 4 primary actions: Add, remove, move, & reconfigure.

Each action was given a column listing which slots were eligible and recommended due to their performance. For example, the slot floor manager should add more of “bavarian bonus” due to a number of positive outperformances.

A user was able to select the dropdown and see why the slot was recommended. Once a user was satisfied with the proof, they were able to select the slot and it would be linked to other underperforming (in this instance) slots that could be removed.

The reasoning for this is that the slots are linked, you can’t add/remove without end or you will have an overcrowded or empty floor. So the slots are all linked to each other.

On premise vs cloud is a huge debate for Tribal Casinos, the bulk of Vizexplorer’s clients. We met with a number of Tribal councils to ensure them of the safety of their data and the benefits of cloud based software.

It may seem trivial in our day and age of SaaS but this was a revolutionary concept for many clients who were used to 6+ months of installation cycles. We were able to speed up the onboarding time, the time to viewing data, and in turn speed up their profits.

Anecdotally, we were able to do such an incredible job at uploading and configuring their data (happened in milliseconds) that we had to deliberately set the upload, configure, and load process to be around 30 seconds artificially. This was due to too much suspicion on the slot floor managers, wrongfully perceiving that we had NOT go all of their data.

Cloud based

outcomes

Award-winning

G2E Most Innovative Tech

6

months to complete the MVP

35

Slot floor managers & techs interviewed