Development

In 2019, the Golden Nugget Online business was growing rapidly, having added a wide range of new promotions and product offerings. An internal review of our customer support product revealed a number of shortcomings, (1) It wasn't built into the product so if customers tried to use it in the app, it directed them to an external website (2) The customization options were lacking so there were no ways of making it look on-brand or present the information more visually (3) The user experience for both us as the operator and the customer was extremely poor (4) The cost of this third party service was increasing its rates.

We formed a small internal team to build a fully custom help center that would address each of those issues. The result was a success. We created much more visually robust and informative articles, a more easily searchable interface, and effectively reduced the number of customer service tickets we received.

Our base product lacked the functionality to add a prize wheel that could be hooked into our bonus system. After years of building other dynamic page content, I worked out a solution that would enable us to build a large tent-pole promotion around a Golden Nugget branded prize wheel. One of the main requirements included needing the results to be different depending on the player segment. For that reason we didn’t put any information on the wheel itself, the message would only display after the wheel spun and the animation fully played out. Once the player got their result they could claim it for use on their account. This was a fun and interesting challenge, to produce such a striking interactive element, but with unique logic on the back-end.

Halloween is a wonderful time of year, tapping into people's sense of mystery and superstition. The themes of the season align perfectly with the spirit of casino customers looking for luck to deliver them treats instead of tricks. For this project, the team came up with the idea of inviting customers inside a witch's spooky house where each day a cauldron would reveal a new offer for that day. The page was designed to be fully responsive, able to work both on desktop web products and mobile apps, using a combination of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL. Each day's offers were set up in a database table and revealed accordingly based on certain criteria specific to the customer.

Making this promotion automated was a key objective for the team because it reduced the amount of manual work involved. It also offered greater flexibility for the team. Often times, there might be issues with games or other concerns that occur during the duration of a long-term promotion, and we'll have to pivot quickly. By keeping the user experience consistent, we could update the promo offers on the back-end with no impact on the front-end.

The Golden Offers scratch card was one of our first attempts at delivering some kind of gamified element players could interact with to receive an exclusive daily offer. There are several advantages to building a promotion where the bonus mechanic isn’t immediately available to players. A constant struggle for the team was attaching offers to specific games due to the fact they may not release on schedule or they may be pulled for compliance reasons.

On the back-end, the marketing team could update a CSV file and use it to update the database with each days’ offer. The visual of the scratch card was fun to design. I used a script that could simulate the scratch effect on the card. For user experience considerations, I made it so that as long as 50% of the gold foil was scratched off, it would fully reveal the daily offer allowing the user to click the button to claim it.

Every December, Golden Nugget gets into the holiday spirit by giving customers access to a unique take on the traditional advent calendar. This year's theme involved recreating aspects from some of the most iconic holiday movies for each day of the promotion, in a way that tugs on nostalgic heartstrings while being generic enough to avoid any IP concerns. This was definitely one of the most ambitious projects I've been involved with because it combined every area of expertise I have from coming up with the idea, project managing, designing static graphics, creating the animations and editing the video clips, and putting it all together into an interactive web page. You can view a demo of this project below. Clicking a number will show the animation for that day.

Starting in 2018, Golden Nugget began running a yearly wagering race. The race was divided into monthly segments, each with its own prize pool. At the beginning of the following new year the winners would be crowned. A critical piece of the race was the ability for players to track their points and progress. Our base product lacked the functionality to add leaderboards, so I worked with our business analyst to build a custom leaderboard component that could be embedded into a web page. It has the functionality to take the users’ ID and display their personal rankings, it has a search function, could display both the leaderboard results and the prize table within the same component. Multiple leaderboards were supported on the same component. Depending on the time frame, this component usually only needed to accommodate a leader board for monthly and yearly races, but the same component was repurposed later to use more. The benefit of this was being able to display a large amount of information in a small space. On the back-end we were able to build scripts that could update the leaderboard automatically. This was a major advantage over basic HTML tables that would have to be updated manually.