Case Study


Full Tilt Poker

Homepage Redesign

Brief: Create a new design for the Full Tilt website to be consistent with new brand aesthetic and to increase conversion/retention rates and SEO efficiency while decreasing bounce rate.

Full Tilt Poker was the world's second largest online poker site, with over 23 million registered users and in excess of 1.2 million homepage visitors per month.

In July 2014, Full Tilt went through a rebrand exercise which required a redesign of the homepage design.
As Head of Design & Brand Services, I led the team behind the creation of our new design and worked alongside development teams and product managers to successful implementation of the new design.

I had been part of the team that designed the previous homepage in 2008. Over the years, the following problems had become evident:

  1. Large amount of screen space dedicated to branding was no longer matched by Marketing spend or customer's brand awareness
  2. Significant screen space given to 'Take Our Tour' and homepage video which had very poor conversion rates.
  3. Due to dwindling sign-ups, the "Social Proof" area showing game activity was no longer compelling reason to download software
  4. Promotion area too far down the page and often below the fold on small screen sizes
  5. Overall lack of SEO information
  6. Overall lack of persuasion architecture.


From a purely aesthetic point of view, the site was looking very dated:

  1. Aesthetically, website feels dark; the distinctive black & white colour scheme no longer in line with brand strategy.
  2. Due to increases in average screen resolutions, site now felt small and claustrophobic to most users.
  3. Site lacked a strong visual hierarchy
  4. Lack of content on the homepage is underwhelming.

Process

The process for creating the final design was based on the classic "build, learn, measure" iterative loop on which our User-Centred Design processes were based.

Requirements Gathering

Using the existing homepage as a reference, we entered into a requirements-gathering phase. This included a review of existing analytics and interviews with key stakeholders across the company (marketing leaders, business intelligence teams, SEO team) and web development & web publishing teams.

Following several rounds of consultation with stakeholders, we devised an overall strategy for the design that prioritised Conversion (i.e. product download and new account creation), Promotions and special offers, User on-boarding and Cross-vertical awareness.




Design

Armed with the results of our stakeholder interviews and analytical data, we began the iterative process of creating layouts, prototypes and wireframes.

These were presented to stakeholders for feedback and gradually passed through higher-fidelity iterations until a final wireframe was signed off.

Graphic Design

As we moved on to the graphic design phase of the project, we began to notice some weaknesses in the page design.

The final approved copy was heavily driven by SEO requirements. As a result, it was very rich in SEO value, but very uninformative for actual users. The hierarchy of the page was such that we had lots of elements of equal priority, leading to a design that tended to look messy and unstructured.

As a result, the layout resulted in a page that was long, but was filled with largely uninteresting content and which lacked a natural focal point.






In discussion with my team of designers, I made the decision to change our approach to the design of the page. While still respecting the approved wireframes, we designed a page more like a PPC landing page. The core functionality (branding, download button, on-boarding information) would be merged into one main section at the top of the page, and the additional SEO content would be given a very light design.

This "top-heavy" design was the perfect solution for the page; human users would find all the content they needed in the top section of the page, search engine crawlers would find all the information they needed at the bottom of the page.

As a failsafe for users who did scroll down the page, we distributed additional download buttons across each section of the homepage. No matter where a user was on our page, they were close to a download button.


Post-launch Evaluation

In the months following launch, our analytics team gathered statistical information on the performance of the new design.

While traffic to the page remained consistent, conversion rates increased by 26.2% and bounce rates decreased by 15.3%.

Heat maps and scroll maps created with Hotjar supported the decisions made during the graphic design phase - users were focusing their attention on the image heavy area at the top of the page (specifically the Download button) and very few users were scrolling down the page. Those that did scroll were clicking on download buttons further down the page.





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