Contents.
Company overview.
MrQ is a UK based online casino. What differentiates the company is that it builds all of its core tools in-house in order to have full control over the customer experience.
Project overview.
MrQ's in-house CMS, Spark, needed improvements. Initially developed as a side project, it suffered from bloat, missing features, and usability issues. I was tasked to identify bottlenecks and streamline the platform to enhance stakeholder productivity and confidence.
Goals.
Address problems having a negative impact on stakeholder workflows.
Simplify the user experience.
My responsibilities.
Interviewing stakeholders.
Auditing product.
Identifying opportunities.
Interaction design.
Prototyping.
Research.
I conducted interviews with five stakeholders across different departments (Operations, Content, Data, QA) to understand their Spark workflows. Stakeholders demonstrated their pain points through screen sharing sessions. After reviewing recordings, I organized findings for comprehensive analysis.
Key findings.
Problem | Category | Interview location | Problem frequency | User story | Frustration | Potential solution |
Spark positions newely added games at the bottom of the games list. | Game management | 01:49 | 6-7 games / day approx | As a QA engineer, I want to position new games at the top of the games list in Spark so that they may be easily discovered by users and tested for their popularity in production. | When I add new games into Spark, those games automatically get positioned at the bottom of the games list. I need to manually drag new games to the top of the list (which is over 1,000 titles long) and the UI doesn’t allow me to do this quickly and easily. | 1. Position newely added games at the top of the games list by default.
2. Make it possible to choose a position for new games when they’re being added into Spark. |
Games are easily mislabelled with the wrong game provider label. | Game management | 09:59 | 10-15 games / week approx | As a content manager, I want to ensure that new games are labelled with the correct game provider so that PQ insights relating to game providers are correct. | When I’m setting up a new game, Spark fills the ‘game provider’ field with the wrong provider. If I forget to update the field with the correct game provider, then that game will be mislabelled and PQ will treat that game as one from the wrong provider. | When setting up a new game, instead of having Spark prefill the game provider field, It would be better if I were asked to manually select the correct game provider. |
Spark doesn’t allow users to specify a position for new games when they’re being added. | Game management | 14:00 | As head of operations, when I’m adding a new game to Spark, I want to be able to choose its target position, so I can ensure the correct order of games across the ‘All games’ and ‘New games’ categories on site. | When I add new games to Spark, they’re placed at the bottom of the games list. Even though I wouldn’t want new games to be placed at the top (as that would make the ‘All games’ and ‘New games’ tabs on site reflect the same games in the same order), I’d still like to give newly added games a fair ranking under the ‘all games’ tab which I could specify. | Allow users to specify a destination for games which are being added to Spark. | |
Spark doesn’t indicate the reason a game has been disabled. | Game management | 21:02 | 2 games / week approx | As a content manager, I want to be able to re-enable games that have been disabled so that users can play them and CRM can promote them. | 1. Sometimes CRM make plans which involve specific games which are disabled in Spark. When this happens I might need to re-enable them, but this creates overhead as I’d need to find out why they’ve been disabled in the first place and whether they should remain disabled.
2. Sometimes players ask us to add games to our product which we do in fact have but which have been disabled. Figuring out why they’ve been disabled is a tedious process as Spark does not indicate the reason a game has been disabled. | When a game has been disabled, stakeholders should be able to insert information as to why the game has been disabled which will be saved to Spark. It would be useful if stakeholders could get notified about disabled games as this impacts CRMs plans. |
Games are missing some essential metadata in Spark. | Game management | 23:00 | All games | As head of operations, I want games to be tagged with rich metadata, so that I can manage games on very granular levels. | We’re currently storing lots of metadata in Google sheets. If we had this data shifted to Spark, we’d be able to manage games at granular levels. One example of this would be us having visibility over game volatility, max exposure, game RTP, theme and much more. | 1. Allow users to port metadata from Google sheets into Spark.
2. Add a metadata panel in the ‘add new game’ page in Spark with respective input fields.
3. Make games retrievable with metadata under the ‘all games’ list in Spark. |
When new games are added into Spark, we need to manually move them to the correct category. | Game management | 29:22 | All games | As head of operations, when I’m adding a new game into Spark, I want that game to automatically be added to the correct vertical and category in the product (based on the game’s metadata), so I can avoid doing this manually. | Since Spark is missing some inputs under the ‘add new game’ flow, such as ‘game category’ and ‘game type’, new games need to be dragged to the correct category after they’re added into Spark. | Add metadata fields under the ‘add new game’ page which determine where a game will live in the secure product. |
Final design.
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Adding rich and meaningful metadata to games.
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Keeping team members in the loop when games get disabled.
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Making it easy to position new games in the right place.
Outcome.
User-Centered Problem Solving: The project effectively addressed specific pain points identified through stakeholder interviews, leading to targeted solutions for game management and metadata handling.
Automation Reduces Manual Work: Implementation of smart form pre-filling and automated notifications significantly reduced manual effort, showing how automation can improve operational efficiency.
Cross-functional Communication: The solution improved team communication by implementing automated notifications when games are disabled, ensuring all stakeholders stay informed of important changes.
Metadata Management: Centralizing metadata management in Spark instead of spreadsheets demonstrated the importance of having a single source of truth for game information.
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