Bringing free-to-play rewards to Hard Rock Casinos
How we created custom online experiences for Hard Rock Casino properties around the world with our reward platform
Summary
Though they are known for their restaurants, the Hard Rock Casinos are the brand’s most extensive and lucrative business line. Our Greentube Pro platform was selected to develop their social casino games for web & mobile.
Partnering with the Seminole Tribe of Florida and Hard Rock International, we integrated with each property individually and created engaging, rewarding experiences for resort casino goers.
Project Info
I was the Creative Director at BlueBat Games where we created Greentube Pro, a marketing solution that connects land-based casinos with their customers through social casino games. Players can earn rewards towards coming back to the resorts while playing their favourite games online.
For this project, led the design team and marketing teams and participated in much of the UI/UX design myself. The first phase of development was under a year (2018).
We initially launched with six customized experiences for each of their Florida properties and later expanded to include a dozen additional Hard Rock properties throughout North America and internationally.
The Seminole Tribe owns two Hard Rock casinos and four Seminole Casinos in Florida, each with their own distinct flavour and clientele.
Research
We had already laid some of the groundwork with other casino projects (Foxwoods, Treasure Island, and Mount Airy) but this one was different because of the sheer number of Hard Rock properties.
We were invited on a tour of the six Hard Rock and Seminole Casinos across Florida, meeting with every single marketing team from each of the properties and the Hard Rock HQ team in Orlando.
We collected customer demographics, made connections to obtain licensed visuals and brand guidelines, and discussed the marketing opportunities available in the apps that would drive online traffic back to the land-based locations.
Design
After these kick-off meetings, we set to work constructing the creative vision for the project, balancing scope and functionality while also pushing the best visuals we could offer given our technical limitations (at the time we were making native iOS and Android apps, along with a web version).
I directed the mock-up and conceptual phase and presented the vision (a gamified take on the brand) to Hard Rock stakeholders for sign-off.
With the visual guidelines established, I set up our JIRA project for the art team to complete the desktop, mobile, and tablet designs and started to work on documentation for the front-end implementation to go smoothly.
I worked with outsource agencies for extra deliverables and customizations we couldn’t take care of in-house, and monitored our source files for efficiency and continuity.
I also helped supervise the front-end implementation stage, creating tickets and reviewing the technical take on the visuals, layouts, animations, and sound effects. Just like I do with the art team, I make sure we stay on brand and respect the visual language of the design guidelines.
Testing
For features still in development, I organized a few UX workshops internally to work around some cognitive biases that were worming their way into our process.
One, in particular, was centered around a Message Inbox feature. Our front-end developers were quite siloed because they were developing native apps very much on their own. I wanted to bring more cohesion into the final product (and also the team in general) so I roped everyone into a structured workshop where we evaluated the feature’s functionality on platforms they were unfamiliar with.
The roots of these workshops were based on a fantastic talk I attended by Laura Teeples entitled, “We Don’t Have Time for UX.” Her method is solid, and although I only used a portion of it to match the level of complexity we were dealing with, it’s a great method to rapidly improve a product’s UX.
Throughout the project in general, I worked with the QA team (both internal and external) to sort out technical vs graphic bugs and assisted with explaining product decisions/functionality if needed.
The riskiest addition to this project was the property selector, and while mostly a technical feat, it was great to see the custom-branded graphics come together during testing. The property selector was not meant for frequent use by players (most customers have their favourite casino and stick with it) but we still needed to test it extensively to make sure each moving piece was in the right place.
Launch configs, ASO, and marketing templates
Next we set up all the configurable graphics in our back office and ran it through another QA pass. At the same time, I coordinated the artists in conjunction with the Hard Rock Online team and internal marketing team in app store optimization, setting the tone for the copy and images used for the Google Play and Apple App Store.
I also connected the artists with the marketing teams to generate the branded templates used for emails, push notifications, and social media posts. After few rounds of back and forth with Hard Rock, we were good to go live!
Live Operations
Hard Rock, like all other Greentube Pro casino partnerships, took care of all the user acquisition. But internally, I managed the player facing engagement marketing team (Live Ops). I coordinated the monthly marketing calendars based on business intelligence from the data analysts and our Head of Product, meeting regularly with Hard Rock stakeholders.
I coordinated events with the land-based casinos, organized sweepstakes, and iterated on our in-game event marketing strategies and planning. I also managed graphics production with Live Ops (hundreds of images every month!) and advised on the best copy and layouts to employ for everything from high impact events to smaller scale communications.
Takeaways
We took on this project before we transitioned to using React Native, so making even small changes was not trivial, especially since some changes could affect other casinos on the Greentube Pro platform as well. Because of this, we weren’t able to make improvements very quickly.
Nonetheless, our innovative platform resonated with Hard Rock fans and it became an integral part of their global digital presence.