CMS & Back-End Consolidation
Kindred / 32Red — 4 months — 2022–2023
⚠ Some visuals are restricted or anonymised due to ongoing NDA obligations.
📣 Challenges
Business owners and colleagues across many teams — acquisition, content, promotions, game categorisation, segmentation and more — manage vital systems in multiple aging tools that have reached their final days. These prevent the integration of new features across different areas, including the front-end.
These back-end management tools were not built for big data, many concurrent operations or multiple users across different roles, causing crashes and significant latency during critical operations at peak times.
Back-end issues translate directly into front-end issues that can impact users for longer than expected on key areas and journeys. It's impossible to add new functionality and experience improvements to the front-end without deep back-end changes.
🎯 Objective
Unify the different in-house CMS and tools into a robust, role-based CMS — Winston — tailored for multiple brands and built to cater to different game providers, markets & restrictions, regulatory and compliance needs, languages, currencies, CRM & promotional activities, and many others, offering best-in-class performance and functionality.
🏆 Final Results
🥋 My Role
Team Lead across a team of 1 Senior Product Designer (Rita Fernandes), 1 Researcher (Maria Ramos) and 1 Content Writer (Chris Vaughn). Held Dailies, Weeklies and Retrospectives to ensure the project, tasks and objectives were being met throughout.
Organised meetings and interviews with different teams — development, QA, PMs, stakeholders, and both new and seasoned users of the existing systems — to understand requirements, objectives, pain points and delivery roadmaps. Laid the initial research foundation and the initial system and information architecture.
Established the architecture of the system and priorities for MVP and following releases, coupled with research and content, while defining Winston's visual identity and overall user experience. Regular catchups with key stakeholders ensured consistent progress reviews and alignment.
Presented final deliverables to stakeholders, development and other relevant teams for final release and in company-wide events.
📑 Methodology
Starting with a deep research into the current ecosystem and functionality — and after many interviews and meetings with teams, stakeholders and seasoned as well as new users of the existing systems — we gathered the stepping stones to begin the process.
Insights from these interactions laid the foundation for the initial maps, flows and information architecture. From there the first mockups were born, with prototypes and a defined visual identity shaping Winston's appearance and key experience factors that created a unifying language across many different "worlds".
Workshops and presentations were booked throughout the project to ensure the team, stakeholders and remaining teams — from Development, Data+BI and Compliance+Player Safety, to CRM, SEO+Acquisition, Customer Support and Sustainability — were on the same page and value was being delivered at every step.
🧠 Retrospective & Learnings
One of the interesting exercises we did was to imagine how the casino experience would look in a few years — tighter regulations, much clearer dashboards and data visualisation on spend and gameplay, but also deeper integration with games and promotional content, creating a seamless omnichannel real-time environment with extreme customisation and gamification.
This helped define a roadmap of features and enhancements for our products in the coming years, and gave us an extensive list of capabilities that Winston would need to grow up to, mature and support over time.
Winston also presented an opportunity to review many existing processes from a regulatory, compliance and payments level — streamlining those into easier systems that translate into better, frictionless user journeys.
📌 Features
- Casino "in a box" — multi-brand, multi-locale, multi-provider.
- Handles all necessary compliance and regulatory checks & safety audits based on country.
- Restrictions based on player and bonus abusers, player groups, games, locales, providers and more.
- Streamlined management of games and game providers, categorisation, relevance and cross-selling.
- Efficient handling of diverse content and related functionality — including non-content pages, promotional content, banners and overlays — with revision history.
- Built-in SEO capabilities and enhancements.
- Robust system for managing promotions and creating promotional journeys/funnels.
- Simplified generation of landing pages to support marketing and acquisition efforts.
- User-friendly dashboards for enhanced usability.
- Improved image handling through uploads and dynamic image creation features.
- IT infrastructure and database restructuring for optimal performance and future-proofing.
🔧 Tools
User Zoom · User Testing · Google Forms · Optimizely · Adobe Analytics · Snowplow · Google Analytics · Figma · Miro · Confluence · JIRA · After Effects · HTML & CSSThank you for reading! ❤️
