Play-It Lottery Playstand
2018-2020 – Creative Direction, Industrial Design & Engineering
This program was designed and developed while leading the design and engineering team at Blake Jarrett & Company. For more information on bringing the Play-It Playstand to your lottery, please click here to get in touch with the Blake Jarrett & Co. Lottery team.
The Playstand is the workhorse of the lottery retail experience. Serving as the main touchpoint for customers, they process the majority of player interactions in convenience, gas and grocery stores. After a multi-decade long run, the Ontario Lottery was looking to upgrade the experience for their customers and replace the existing infrastructure of Playstands.
In addition to showing their age, the existing Playstands was missing key features core lottery players needed — including digital game information, ticket scanning and an accessibly-designed kiosk. The lottery was also facing a challenge of adoption with new players — resulting in part due to a lack of understanding of how the games worked and inconsistent branding on the existing fleet, which had eroded consumer confidence.
To address these issues, our team developed a new Playstand platform to serve the Ontario Lottery’s retail operations for the next decade. Prominent branding and an interactive digital screen presented the Ontario Lottery authoritatively and helped educate customers on how to play. Improved ergonomics, accessible counter and trackpad and retractable pen module (with redundant failsafe pen cup) ensured a consistent, experience for all customers.
The Playstand features a modular design, allowing OLG scale its investment through a staged roll out by starting with an analogue design and upgrading to digital in successive key markets. This modular design —with robust, molded plastic components — ensured sufficient durability and repairability to last throughout its long field life. Modularity also extended to the core interaction area allowing technology to be upgraded as the lottery’s operations evolved.
Above are a selection of the touchpoints in our design development. The first five models show early designs that were brought to the representational prototype stage for user testing. Below, you can see a few shots of the user testing for insight on customers perception of the design and branding as well as the kiosks accessibility and usability.
The four right most models show the revised design after feedback from testing having narrowed to the sleek rectilinear design. The models show the front and rear of the Playstand in its potential configurations: digital screen module, analogue module with analogue jackpot sign and full promotional analogue unit.
The final representational prototype kiosk at OLG’s launch event in its original light blue colourway.
Once the final concept design had been validated our team moved to design for manufacturing. Below, Panel 1 shows the development of the Playstand’s internal frame design and molded body panel. Panel 2 shows the development of the Playstand’s dual purpose frame extrusion which also functioned as the side light panel. Panel 3 shows the development of the dual function pen cup and retractable pen mechanism, to assist customers in filling out selection slips.
Production samples in office for review before launch.
I led the team at Blake Jarrett & Company that designed, engineered, prototyped and implemented production of the program from initial research to installation in field. The Play It Kiosk platform has become the default in Canada with 2,500 units launched in Ontario (and an additional 10,000 scheduled) and an additional 5,000 units across Western Canada. The Play-It Kiosk is currently in testing in select US markets.
