Backstory
Fun and Games while at Sea
Carnival Corporation has a portfolio of 9 different hospitality and travel brands that offer best-in-class service and amenities, one of which is their amazing onboard casinos gaming experience. These casinos are a fun and exciting space for guests to come and unwind, enjoy themselves, and even win some money or earn various perks as a bonus to their sailing experience. But one element was hindering the guest experience and business performance for the casino: the user interface on the slot machines and the many obstacles it presented to players.
Key Insights
All Hands On Deck
Cruisers represent a wide range of demographics and abilities — all across the spectrum of age, native language, physical limitations, neurodiverse backgrounds or technical ability. At a minimum, the digital gaming experience should be optimized for varying degrees of accessibility and adaptability.
Many current casino technical systems are a reactive result of patchwork solutioning. The entire casino experience should be more intuitive and easier to understand from end to end for all users. We created a design and component library that could grow and evolve to offer more solutions as other systems are made more robust.
Onboard staff are the real stars of the overall guest experience, so we prioritized solutions that could reduce the need for them to educate guests, which would allow them more time to focus on delighting guests and delivering joy.
Our Impact
100+
Hours of
research
700
New lines
of code
72
Brand new
panels delivered
Strategy
Plotting the Course
The existing interface was a minimally customized version of an out-of-box solution that was intended to be a temporary upgrade that instead remained in place for years. While mostly functional, it did not match current casino offerings in visual excitement or ease of use.
Postlight spent hundreds of hours with onboard guests, staff and stakeholders to uncover the best opportunities for improvement and came out with a strong perspective to increase clarity and accessibility, focused on delighting the guests and keeping the user journey as simple as possible to reduce user error.
Approach
Navigating the Waters
Before beginning our design phase, we needed to immerse ourselves in the casino experience. Postlight joined two sailings on two separate brands (Carnival Cruise Line and Holland America Line) to perform interviews, disguised observations and partner with business leaders to hear what they found was most important.
The team also performed in depth research across the competitive landscape, researching best-in-class casinos and resorts on land. With insights in hand, we created a sleek and marketing friendly design that we further refined and finalized through user acceptance testing with actual guests and casino staff. We then went on-site to Carnival Corporation headquarters in Miami to deploy our work in person and QA the user interface on actual slot machine hardware.
OUTCOME
Bon Voyage
Postlight delivered a ship-ready build of the guest user interface along with a full component library and detailed documentation to guarantee that Carnival Corporation could deploy and update the new experience on ships throughout the fleet.
