Poker Stars: Improving user perception of rewards
Problem Statement
My team needed to improve player perception of Poker Stars's Promotions and Rewards because despite issuing more rewards by volume, frequency, and variety than our competitors, players were not satisfied and were not using rewards.
UX Methodology
My team used a combination of interviewing, observing, designing, testing, iterating, and metric tracking to ensure designs hit KPIs. We did multiple rounds of ideation, going deeper and deeper into one or two flows every time to flesh out key interactions. We worked closely with our development squads to ensure everything we designed was feasible.
Research & Insights
We did a deep dive with player interviews and observations with 12 interviews with 3 casino players, 4 poker players, and 5 sports betters across the UK, USA, Canada, Denmark, and India.
- Players wanted simple, easy-to-redeem rewards but most were hard to find and complicated to use, leading to confusion and frustration
- Rewards need to be tangible. Insignificant winnings make users feel scammed & affects perception of the entire brand - losing trust & making players feel like they're being marketed to rather than rewarded.
- Users do not go looking for past unused rewards. Issuing rewards at relevant times is super important - players hate “missing” a reward. No one knows where to go if they don't use rewards instantly. If the reward is not served at the time of need, it will just go unused.
Design
We created a centralised hub for players to find all the rewards and promotions. Centralising everything across Poker, Casino, and Sport betting took multiple phases as we had to negotiate between different squads and wrangle different back-ends.
Impact
We increased rewards usage. 84.7% of rewards that aren't used immediately don't get used at all decreased to 52.4%
We improved user perception of rewards from net 36.4% satisfied to net 48.9% satisfied.
Reflections & Next steps
The next steps are to continue to design the “Rewards” area.
I was continuously working with PMs and POs to build monitoring into our native products. We had previously relied very heavily on the web platforms for monitoring but a lot of our products (such as poker tournaments) are not available on web and consequently, a large chunk of our users are not using web.
Once we have better and more granular metrics showing the behaviour of our users, I'm hoping to be able to
- Validate the business and user value of a communications or notification centre
- Have more questions for additional qualitative research
- Make improvements on the Promotions and Rewards Hub which has become the big bet of the Marketing tribe over the last 5ish quarters.