Case Study — Embedded UX / Gaming Hardware

IGT Casino Service Window — Cashless Funding Redesign

A service window is the on-screen menu built into a physical slot machine. It is how a player loads money, checks a balance, or reaches support, without leaving the machine they are sitting at.

Casinos traditionally ran on cash: players left the machine to visit an ATM that charged five to thirty dollars a transaction. The fix had to live on a small, fixed, regulated screen bolted to hardware I could not redesign — and that constraint shaped nearly every decision that follows.

In short — I owned research, UX, and interaction design for this redesign end to end — and lifted cashless usage 20% on hardware I couldn't touch.

Role
Senior UX/UI Designer
Focus
Cashless Funding on Slot Machines
Company
IGT
Team
1 junior UX designer, 8 developers
Duration
1 year (2020–2021)
Tools
Adobe XD, LucidChart, Google Analytics, Open Sans, HTML5
IGT slot machine with the VIP service window panel open, showing a message from a casino host
20%
Increase in cashless usage after redesign
16
Players in focus groups on cashless funding
88%
Saw themselves as potential cashless users
The Constraint

Not just replacing cash — redesigning trust

The challenge was not building a payment button. It was redefining how money moves through a regulated, security-critical ecosystem, on hardware most digital designers never touch. Every decision below — the research, the testing, the interface itself — was shaped by the limits laid out here.

What I had to balance

  • Player trust in a new way of handling their money
  • Regulatory and compliance requirements
  • Operational efficiency for casino staff
  • Business growth for IGT and casino partners

What the system required

  • Financial compliance and anti-money laundering rules
  • Player identity verification
  • Transaction security at every step
  • Regional gaming regulations, which vary by jurisdiction

What the hardware allowed

  • A white-label product: the same interface had to work under many different casino brands, not just IGT's own
  • A small, fixed physical screen — no responsive layout, no extra room to add clarity
  • Existing machine hardware and touch input, which I could not redesign alongside the software
  • Tested vertical, horizontal, and custom screen configurations to find what actually worked for seamless interaction
  • Adapted complex UX workflows to custom-sized screens that were never built for web or mobile design standards

My Role

I led UX research, strategy, and design for the cashless funding flow on the service window — the primary player-facing screen covered in this case study. That work sat inside a larger cashless initiative at IGT, which also included a casino operations platform for floor staff and an internal support platform for technical teams; I contributed to both, and mention them briefly below for context, but the flows, testing, and outcomes described here are about the player-facing service window.

I worked alongside a junior UX designer and a development team of eight, across product, engineering, compliance, marketing research, casino partners, and internal support teams, to align UX decisions with business and technical constraints.

The Problem

Funding a slot machine meant leaving it

Players funded gameplay through on-property ATMs charging five to thirty dollars a transaction. That friction cost casinos revenue and cost players their sessions — and the fix had to fit inside the constraint above, not around it.

Four-panel storyboard: the old cash-based world, player and casino pain, UX strategy and design, and cashless success

How the shift from cash friction to a cashless ecosystem actually unfolded, start to finish.

Player Experience

ATM fees and long lines delayed or discouraged funding. Many players left to find a cheaper machine, or ended sessions early — shorter play, less engagement.

Casino Operations

Long ATM queues, floor congestion, and no visibility into player funding behavior translated directly into lost revenue and reduced retention.

Business Impact

Removing that friction reliably increased player spend. The opportunity was real — but only if the experience felt secure, intuitive, and trusted.

Research & Personas

A year of player behavior, before any screens

Because the hardware was fixed and every change went through a regulatory review cycle, there was little room to learn by iterating on-device. I partnered with IGT's marketing research team to analyze over a year of qualitative and quantitative data, synthesized into core player personas grounded in real behavior, not assumptions — the research had to do the work the constraint wouldn't let screens do.

Surveys Focus groups In-person & remote interviews Stakeholder workshops
56%
Responded positively — no card, no cash, no ATM trips
44%
Responded reluctantly, mainly over account security

What players liked

  • No need to carry a card or cash
  • No wait to replace a lost card
  • Safer than carrying cash on the floor
  • No ATM trips or fees

What worried them

  • Account and phone security
  • Loading money felt complicated
  • Some preferred a physical ticket to hold onto
  • Storing an app on their personal phone
Research persona: Samantha, a purpose-driven, points-driven, and reserved player

One of the core player personas built from this research — internal shorthand name, kept here as evidence of the process rather than a polished deliverable.

IGT player focus group results for cardless connect and cashless — participant breakdown, benefits, and concerns

The original focus group readout — the source data behind the stats above.

Journey Mapping

One flow, four different systems underneath it

Using real player flows and direct quotes, I mapped the end-to-end journey across every system a single funding action touches: player experience, casino floor operations, technical support, and compliance reporting.

Usability Testing

What early testing actually found

On hardware I couldn't patch overnight, a broken flow on the casino floor was a real cost to real players and real revenue — not a bug ticket. That raised the stakes of testing itself. I partnered with live casino properties to test cashless prototypes with real paying customers on the floor — account creation, machine pairing, wallet funding, cash-in and cash-out, error handling, and support flows. These early findings are what shaped the redesign priorities below.

10
Participants in live, on-floor usability testing
80%
Found tasks very difficult on the early software
100%
Experienced a bug; 90% of tasks were interrupted by one
80%
Confused by loading times with no visual feedback

Key insight: inconsistent casino connectivity affected transaction speed and pairing reliability — leading to parallel infrastructure work with casino IT teams, alongside the interface changes below. In parallel, I ran remote usability testing with internal support teams, redesigning workflows to reduce tool fragmentation and speed up incident resolution.

IGT usability testing key findings — participants, task difficulty, bugs, and flow friction

The original usability testing readout — the source data behind the stats above.

Design Execution

Simplifying a screen most designers never see

With no room to add screen real estate and no fast iteration cycle, every simplification had to earn its place. Based on research, journey mapping, and live testing, I focused on reducing cognitive load and building trust into the highest-risk transactional moments on the service window — within the same fixed screen the whole project was constrained to.

Before — fragmented layout, unclear money movement, high cognitive load
Old service window: apps menu with point play, cashless, xtra credit, intelligent offer
Apps menu
Old service window: point balance and active xtra credit screen
Point balance
Old service window: balance on card and machine, exit option
Balances
Old service window: confirmation to transfer funds to machine
Transfer confirm
After — clear hierarchy, simplified flows, confidence-driven interactions
New service window: account dashboard with point balance and quick actions
Account dashboard
New service window: account dashboard with cashless action highlighted
Cashless action
New service window: balances split between card and machine
Card vs. machine
New service window: select funding amount screen
Select amount
New service window: accept or decline transfer confirmation
Confirm transfer
New service window: loading indicator showing transfer progress
Transfer progress

More iterations followed these; I no longer have access to those later files.

Accessibility

Designing for hands that aren't all the same

Casino players skew older and more varied in dexterity than a typical mobile app audience, and the service window is fixed at one height and angle on the machine, glanced at mid-game rather than studied. Both changed what "accessible" meant here.

Designing for dexterity

  • Touch targets sized well beyond standard mobile guidelines, for less precise or unsteady hands
  • No swipe-to-confirm or small drag handles — every action was a single, direct tap
  • Primary actions spaced far enough apart to prevent accidental taps mid-transaction

Designing for the floor

  • High-contrast color and larger type for a screen viewed under casino lighting and glare
  • Confirmations legible at a glance, without the player looking away from the reels
  • One-tap decisions, so a player could fund and return to play without breaking focus
Final Execution

Speed versus trust, on a machine bolted to a casino floor

Instant funding had to coexist with regulatory compliance. I prioritized clarity, confirmation, and trust over raw speed — financial safety without breaking a player's immersion in the game.

A player's hand funding a slot machine directly from the cashless service window

Funding directly from the machine — balance on card, credits to machine, confirm, play. No ATM, no card, no wait.

Bonus round in progress with cashless account balance and status visible on the service window

Cashless balance and account status stay visible without pulling the player out of the game.

Player experience goals

  • Immediate balance clarity
  • Simple cashless entry
  • Safe transaction confirmation
  • Rapid return to play

What changed

  • Players stopped losing track of which balance they were spending from — the exact confusion that made "loading money" feel complicated in research
  • Fewer steps meant less time away from the reels — every removed tap was time the friction wasn't cutting sessions short anymore
  • Explicit confirmation meant players trusted the transfer completed, instead of hesitating over whether their money actually moved
  • Moving to Open Sans and HTML5 meant future changes could ship without rebuilding the interface each time — important on hardware where every change already goes through a regulatory review cycle

Closing the loop with research

Two of the biggest concerns from early research (account security, and not wanting another app) fed directly into these decisions:

  • Security: every funding action required a security PIN, and in some cases a password-plus-PIN combination with masked input, before it could complete
  • No new app: cashless was built directly into IGT's existing suite of casino apps rather than a standalone download — the wallet and its digital markers lived inside the service window itself, managed on the backend through a secure app the player never had to touch

The same cashless initiative also touched a casino-operations platform for floor staff and an internal support platform for technical teams — both out of scope for this case study, briefly: simplified compliance monitoring on the floor side, and a shared cross-system record that cut resolution time on the support side.

20% increase in cashless usage.

Simplifying the highest-risk transactional flow — and building trust into every step — turned a feature players were reluctant to try into IGT's most successful on-demand product for this hardware category.

Measured by comparing service window drop-off and cashless usage rates from 2019–2020 against usage in late 2021, after the redesign had been live across casino properties.

Clearer
Distinct, trusted player interactions on the machine
Faster
Safer transactional workflows, fewer steps
Coherent
Stronger consistency across three connected platforms

“A recurring principle from this project was giving the interface room to breathe — cutting complexity and click counts until the player's next action was obvious. On hardware with no room for a wasted tap, that restraint mattered more than any single feature.”

Looking back, most of my work happens on screens people carry in their pocket. This project asked me to design trust into a screen bolted to a slot machine, under regulatory constraints most digital designers never encounter — and that constraint, not the interface itself, was the real design problem.
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