Casumo’s initial product promise was focused around ‘The Adventure’, a loyalty cash-back system built around the traditional slot game. Despite rapid growth, we saw that key retention and engagement metrics were below targets.
As Christmas approached, a key time of year for Casino operators, we faced a challenge to retain players during a festive period where competition for share of wallet is at it’s toughest.
To ship a new product mechanic that would enhance player engagement, boost conversion rates and control bonus costs. The constraints included a tight 5 week timeframe, as we wanted to ensure the new feature set was live for the key Christmas period.
I led the design team through several phases of research and context mapping. To gain insights into our player base, we engaged our Casumo Collective, a group we used for player interviews and surveys. We aimed to understand their motivations, pain points, and desires when playing with us, and the competitors they had accounts with.
Based on the insights gathered in our early research, I led the team in a workshop to sketch on more ways we can create additional value from every spin. We mapped ideas to player types we had used in our early work on gamification within the team: Achievers, Socialisers, Explorers and Killers. We also rated ideas based on how well they would complement our existing feature set.
Observing that compared to the almost instant binary win/loss feedback a player receives from a slot game, our existing adventure feature took a long time to bear a reward. So we narrowed focus on ideas with potential for real time reward mechanisms.
From our interviews and field research, we had identified that casino players have a different tendency and need for socialisation through their gaming than sports bettors. Though these tendencies do vary by market, we saw that whereas sports bettors would often share their winning betslips on social meda, online casino players typically keep their activity more private.
Casumo already had an an activity ticker we called the ‘All Seeing Stream’, which would show events (wins, levelling up etc) from other players on the site. This was consistently highlighted as a feature our player’s loved, and we considered how to further leverage the idea of simulating playing amongst others.