Introduction

The Rank Group is an FTSE-listed international gambling and entertainment company operating physical venues and digital platforms across the UK and Europe.

With over 7,700 employees and 3.1 million active customers, its internal systems support a business generating nearly £800M in annual net gaming revenue.

Context

Promotions are a key driver of player acquisition, retention, and engagement.

These promotions were setup behind the scenes using an internal platform tool known as the bonus engine.

What is a bonus engine?

A bonus engine is the system in the background that decides who sees a promotion, who is allowed to claim it, what rules apply and when the reward should be given.

This tool is called the bonus engine.

A control panel where internal teams set up the offers, rules, and rewards before the player ever sees them.

Problem statement

Creating promotions in the bonus engine was complex and hard to understand.

Teams had to navigate multiple rules, conditions and screens, making it difficult to predict how a promotion would behave once live.

Because of this, teams relied heavily on manual checks, with many issues only discovered after launch.

How might we help teams set up promotions clearly and correctly the first time? With real-time validation while still supporting complex promotion setup logic?

While these signals highlighted the scale of the problem, they did not explain the root causes.

To understand where things were going wrong, discovery focused on how teams set up promotions, how systems interpret those rules and how promotions are managed from start to finish.

Discovery

The Bonus Engine was used by multiple internal teams to configure and manage promotional campaigns across the platform.

Working across a globally distributed organisation, I led a structured discovery phase combining user interviews, workflow analysis, and cross-functional workshops with teams in London, Gibraltar, Mauritius, and Cape Town.

The finding showed that the issue wasn’t just usability, but how the system was structured and understood across teams. A gap emerged between expected behaviour and how the system actually worked, leading to inconsistent outcomes and low confidence.

Why we created it: Teams couldn’t easily see what happens to a promotion from start to finish.

What it shows: A simple map showing how a promotion is set up, validated, launched and managed.

Outcome.

• Identified where errors were happening in the workflow

• Highlighted the need for earlier validation

• Clarified how different teams depend on each other

Mapping how the system works behind the scenes

Why we created it: Teams lacked a shared understanding of how promotions moved across the system.

What it shows: A simplified flow of how promotions are surfaced, powered by the promotion engine, managed by teams, and experienced by players.

Outcome.

• Created a shared understanding across teams

• Reduced confusion around how promotions behave

• Established a clear foundation for structuring logic

Simplifying how promotions are configured

Why we created it: The way promotions were set up was complex and hard to understand

What it shows: We deconstructed the configuration model to understand how rules, triggers and rewards connect.

Outcome.

• Reduce mental effort when setting up promotions

• Improved consistency across configurations

• Making behaviour more predictable

Promotion lifecycle

Structure the system around the full promotion lifecycle, improving visibility across creation, validation and management workflows.

System clarity

Make relationships between rules, conditions and rewards clear, so promotion behaviour is easy to understand and predict.

Built-in validation

Introduce validation within the setup process, allowing issues to be identified and resolved as promotions are created, not after.

Strategic direction.

This created a clear and predictable way to configure, reducing uncertainty and helping teams work with more confidence.

Discovery showed that the promotion setup was difficult to understand, with hidden rules, dependencies, scattered configuration and a heavy reliance on manual QA.

The redesign focused on making system behaviour visible while guiding teams through a structured step-by-step workflow.

Promotion lifecycle: Dashboard

Promotion management begins in the dashboard, where teams can view active and scheduled promotions.

A card-based layout surfaces key details such as reward type, status, and activation windows, improving visibility across the promotion lifecycle and making promotions easier to scan and manage.

The interface was designed for quick scanning, rather than detailed inspection.

Dashboard layout direction.

During exploration, both card and list layouts were considered. Cards provided a clearer visual hierarchy, while a list view offered a more compact format for managing larger volumes of promotions.

The card layout was selected as the primary view, with a list view planned for future iterations.

Card layout direction + list view

System clarity: Step-by-step promotion workflow

Promotion setup was redesigned as a step-by-step workflow.

Instead of one dense form, the new experience guides teams through each stage of setup, including eligibility, deposit requirements, rewards, and wagering rules.

Configuration stepper

System clarity: Dynamic reward setup

The rewards section adapts dynamically based on inputs defined earlier in the setup process.

Selections such as reward type, eligibility rules, and deposit conditions automatically adjust the available reward options.

Built-in validation: Preventative safeguards & configuration errors

The interface disables incompatible options and hides fields that are not relevant to the selected promotion type.

Built-in validation: Advisory feedback

Where configurations may introduce risk.

The system provides warning messages highlighting potential issues without blocking progress.

Warning examples

This allows teams to understand rule conflicts while maintaining flexibility.

System clarity: Confident validation

Before activating a campaign.

Teams review the full promotion configuration in a structured confirmation layer.

The validation screen displays key promotion details including eligibility rules, reward structure, deposit conditions, wagering requirements, and campaign timing.

This final step allows teams to verify that the promotion behaves as expected before launch.

Impact

The redesigned configuration experience improved both usability and operational efficiency across the teams responsible for managing promotions.

Improvements were measured against the success metrics defined during the discovery workshop.

Usability

Improving clarity and reducing cognitive load during promotion setup was a key objective of the redesign.

These improvements reflected the impact of the structured configuration flow, clearer rule dependencies, and dynamic configuration behaviour.

Operational efficiency.

The redesign also reduced the operational overhead required to create and manage promotions.

By preventing configuration errors earlier in the workflow, teams were able to launch campaigns with greater confidence and fewer manual interventions.

Governance & risk

Because promotions control financial incentives, improving governance and reducing configuration risk was critical.

The introduction of validation logic and confirmation layers helped ensure that promotions were configured correctly before going live.

By making promotion logic visible and guiding teams through a structured configuration workflow, the redesign transformed promotion setup from a complex, error-prone process into a predictable system teams could confidently operate.