Playwise

I designed Playwise, a concept for the responsible-gaming side of a mobile casino: the deposit limits, session reality checks, breaks and self-exclusion that every licensed operator has to ship. The starting point was an audit rather than a brief. Across live casinos these controls pass their compliance checks and then sit unused, because they live under Account settings, carry legal-sounding names, and put the same friction on the safer choice as on the riskier one. I redesigned the whole set as one calm, dark-mode mobile system: the limit lives in the wallet next to the money, the section is named for what it does, the session shows time, spend and net position honestly, and the reminder carries those numbers instead of just the clock. Every decision is checked against real regulation – UK RTS, Malta's Player Protection Directive, the German state treaty – so the design is defensible, not just tidy.

Responsible-gaming tools are mandatory, already built and already audited, and almost nobody opens them. In the Gambling Commission's own survey, a year's use came out at 17% for financial limits, 10% for a reality check and 5% for a time out. The controls are not missing, they are unreachable: buried in settings, labelled in compliance language, and configured once at registration and never surfaced again. The sharpest problem is the direction of friction – on most products, lowering a limit and raising it are the same one-tap action, so nothing in the interface tells the safer move apart from the riskier one. The job was to keep every control a licence requires and make it something a player actually reaches and uses, without turning the product into a lecture.

I treated the controls as one system, not a settings page. I moved the deposit limit out of the account tree and into the wallet and the game surface, renamed "Responsible Gambling" to plain "Player Controls" so opening it does not mean admitting something about yourself, and gave the session an honest panel – time played, deposited, and net position as one signed number. I built the asymmetry regulators now require directly into the interface: lowering a limit applies immediately, raising it waits, and the screen says which is happening and why. Short breaks from one hour to a month sit one tap away and separate from irreversible self-exclusion, and the limit prompt appears at onboarding while nothing is riding on the answer. Six screens, dark and calm, with the continue button still primary, because the product informs the player rather than arguing with them.