DEAL OR NO DEAL · PLAYTECH · 2024
Role : Lead Product Designer · Team : 1 PM, 2 Engineers, 1 QA · Timeline : 8 weeks · Platform : Mobile (Web)
The Brief Said Fix the UI. The Data Said Fix the Mental Model.
The Hook
It was one of Playtech's highest-profile licensed products — deployed across Tier-1 consumer brands. One design. Hundreds of thousands of active accounts. And a UI that hadn't been touched since the early 2010s.
As Playtech moved into its Next Gen era, this was the product operators pointed to first. The brief: fix what was silently failing players without breaking what they already knew.
A 15% bounce rate. A dead-end post-game loop. A core interaction model that had no moment of consequence. This is how we rebuilt trust in 8 weeks.
Who We Were Designing For
The product's fastest-growing segment was 25-34 year old- mobile-first, playing in short frequent sessions, and comparing every product experience to the best apps on their phone. 60% of users are female. 80% play at least once a week.
When the UI felt confusing or dated, they left. With no path forward after a game ended, they didn't come back.
Old-Gen
Context & Problem Space
This was one of the first products selected for Playtech's Next Gen redesign — the most commercially visible product with the most outdated UX. Three signals from telemetry defined where to focus.
Session replays showed players continuing to interact normally in the seconds after a held prize had been eliminated. They hadn't registered the loss. The UX had no moment of consequence.
Cause-Effect Blindness
01
A legacy dev restriction forced a mandatory info panel at the top, consuming nearly 20% of the mobile viewport at all times. User feedback consistently flagged the UI as cluttered. Users couldn't articulate why, but the data showed them scrolling away from the game.
Viewport Constraints
02
Drop-off data showed the sharpest exit point wasn't during gameplay. It was the 8 seconds immediately after a game ended. There was no path forward embedded in the experience. Players simply left.
Re-Entry Friction
03
With three friction points defined by data not assumption - the challenge wasn't knowing what to solve. It was solving it inside a codebase that pushed back on every decision.
Constraints
The info panel was declared immovable by engineering
Persistent Overhead
We were strictly prohibited from using certain licensed assets in the redesign.
Brand and Legal Constraints
8 weeks from discovery to dev handoff.
The Clock
Turning a Hard Constraint into a UX Feature
Engineering declared the info panel immovable. Rather than accepting it, I brought a working prototype to a cross-functional meeting with the PM, Head of Product, and engineering leads demonstrating a conditional collapse architecture that reclaimed 15% of the viewport during active gameplay while keeping the panel accessible when needed.
The argument wasn't aesthetic. It was behavioural: users were scrolling away from their tickets because the panel was eating the screen. Session data backed it. The prototype de-risked it. The team aligned.
The decision didn't stay inside its brief. The collapsible panel was adopted as a platform-wide UX standard across every product in the Playtech Next Gen network — recognised across product, engineering, and director level.
The adoption across other games in the platform, validated the instinct.
The Five-Option Layout Decision
Five layouts were explored before committing. Options 1–4 each solved one problem while creating another buried hierarchy, brand inconsistency, broken conceptual groupings. Option 5 resolved all of them: the mystery box owned its own row, the prize range and toggle were visually grouped, and the grid sat cleanly beneath.
One decision that didn't make the final screens: When the brief came down for a branded logo box as the mystery box treatment (option 3), I took it to testing before committing. Players couldn't read it as "mystery prize" they saw IP, not intent. The evidence made the case. The question mark box shipped instead. Data over instinct, every time.
Solution
Three solutions. Each mapped directly to a friction point not retrofit after the fact.
Action-to-consequence animation.
From: one overwhelming view for all users.
To: two modes, each optimised for a different mental model.
Paddle / Box view switch
From: session ends, journey stops.
To: the next session is one tap away from inside the current one.
Accessibility
Accessibility wasn't in the brief. I introduced it specifically for the highest-stakes screen in the product: the Deal or No Deal decision moment.
DEAL and NO DEAL needed equal visual weight. No ghost buttons - a secondary-style treatment implies hierarchy where none should exist. Solid fills, white text, defined borders. The distinction is carried by shape, text, and boundary not colour alone.
Switch between box and paddle view
Metrics
Validated by a 30-player moderated usability session I designed and led internally with engineering support and by live operator data post-launch.
Reflections
I couldn't remove the info panel, so I made it interactive. I couldn't use the licensed asset, so I used motion and lighting to create the same emotional presence. What moved the needle was the negotiation, the research leadership, and the ability to see constraints as design material.
When my director pushed for the branded logo box, I disagreed on evidence, not instinct. The question mark box shipped. Players understood it immediately.
What I'd do differently: the mystery box never hit the 1.5× scale originally targeted, and the toggle needed a labelled state from day one rather than a tooltip workaround. Both are known trade-offs I'd resolve earlier next time.
One design decision - the collapsible panel - didn't stay inside its brief. It became the pattern the entire Next Gen platform was built on. That's the standard I hold myself to.