Overview:

Full Tilt Poker was the world’s 2nd largest online poker room up to 2011. The Full Tilt Poker website was key to acquisition and conversion of new customers as the launch pad for download of the FTP software. The site also served to support existing players as a communications platform for game promotions. UX was critical to success of the business.

During its peak in 2007-2010 marketing properties grew from 1 English, US focussed site, to over 200 multi-regional, localised branded sites, in 21 languages, covering Europe, Asia, Australia and South America.

Challenge:

At its peak the site supported an average of 38k daily visitors with Nielsen ranked as the world’s stickiest brand 1.4 million users per month of April, 2009. The site content had sprawled into an unmanageable complex collection of content for SEO, marketing and poker instruction. The site was used to support a large variety of complex brand touchpoints such as TV advertising, print ads, live events, and TV commercials, affiliate advertising, international.

The challenge was to update the site look and feel, whilst creating a robust CMS for the new design to enable faster upload of content to enable more responsive delivery of promotional content to users by content writers, freeing up development team to work on other tasks such as code refactoring. In terms of persuasive architecture, ultimately the goal was to improve sign up conversions.

 

Involvement/Roles/Methods:

  • Customer research, demographic analysis and persona creation
  • Usability testing on existing user journey from site discovery through to site journey, download of software and completion of 1st deposit on game
  • Site analytics examination to establish user behaviour on site
  • Redefinintion of business logic (acquisition, conversion, retention) through site and mapping from business objectives to user journey
  • Wireframing
  • Rapid Prototyping with mockups using Axure
  • Design of system of page templates and UI library used by development team for code refactoring

The Solution:

  • A large content change was not required as 98% of use of site traffic was based on 2% of pages and much of the content was to remain for SEO purposes. A revised home page with a direct download button on page was created to create a 1-click to download path for users.
  • Existing pages were maintained using a more coherent navigation, and refreshed using updated branding and graphics.
  • A system of templates with interchangeable UI elements from an extensive UI library was designed, with code refactoring taking place with implementation.

Results:

Website redesign to align to evolution of brand.

Content audit & re-purposing to accommodate large volume of SEO targeted content.

Code refactoring & CMS creation to enable rapid publishing of content to site to accommodate speed of change in poker world.

Template design & UI library creation for page cusomisation.

Brand guidelines documentation.