How I turned KTO's player account from a second navigation menu into a place to manage money and identity.
01 · Context
KTO was a licensed betting platform in Brazil, and a player's account was where money and identity met: deposits, withdrawals, verification, bank accounts and limits. In the 90 days before the redesign, support tickets about KYC and withdrawals grew 40%, and 11% of withdrawals failed on identity verification or liveness checks.
The cause sat in the interface. A pending verification or an incomplete bank account registration only showed up if the player opened that exact section. Most players learned about it when a withdrawal failed, at the worst possible moment, when they had won money and wanted it out. Mixpanel showed sessions of about eight minutes with 56% scroll depth, and players still left with blockers open.
02 · Two jobs
Nobody had ever decided what My Account was for. Payments, loyalty and the product teams each added what they needed, and the page ended up mixing two jobs: account management (verification, personal data, bank accounts, limits) and product discovery (Casino, Sports, Best Slots), with the same links the hamburger menu already offered.
The data showed which job players actually came for. In Clarity, the most tapped element on the page was the logout link, with 20,339 taps, about 10% of all taps. The product sections below it got almost no attention. Players opened My Account to act, so I framed the project around one thesis: My Account is management, not discovery.
03 · A tracking error
Early in the analysis, the withdrawal rate from My Account came out at 0.8%. If true, it meant almost nobody could find the withdraw button, and it would have pushed the redesign toward the wrong problem.
I checked the event before trusting it. The withdrawal_started event fired from the hamburger menu 93% of the time, so the number measured the menu, not My Account. I dropped it from the analysis and built the case on the numbers that held up.
04 · Cashback
I wrote nine hypotheses before drawing any screen, each with its reasoning, risk, metric and data source. One of them said the cashback banner at the top had a low click rate and slowed players down on their way to a deposit or withdrawal.
The data rejected it. Clarity showed the cashback banner as one of the most clicked elements on the page, and the stakeholder interviews explained why: cashback had high value for Casino, Sportsbook and Loyalty alike. The real problem was that the banner only linked to the cashback page, so players had to leave My Account to find out how much they had. I kept cashback at the top and put the available amount on it.
05 · Validation
Before any scope decision, I wrote down what success would mean: faster completion of deposits, withdrawals and status checks, more cashback engagement, and fewer withdrawal tickets. My plan to get there ran in four phases over about six weeks: data, mental model, prototype tests and label tests. The World Cup then took most of the company's capacity, and the project had to fit into two weeks.
I kept what aligned the company and dropped what validated details. The data analysis stayed, and so did six interviews with the people the change would affect: design, product, CX, VIP account management and Payments. Their purpose was to make sure no team would be surprised at launch. The card sort, the prototype tests, the label test and interviews with players did not fit. I sorted every proposed change by effort and impact, reviewed the matrix with the Payments PM, and her input changed parts of it, so we defined the V1 scope together.
06 · The new My Account
V1 removed product discovery from My Account. Quick actions for deposit, withdrawal, cashback and notifications moved to the top, and everything else went into four groups (Rewards, Financial, Account, and Support and Security), each item with a short description of what it contained. The descriptions came from the competitor benchmark, where the clearest account areas used them to remove guesswork without onboarding.
I proposed the changes to the header and My Account, and taking discovery out of My Account changed the header too. Once My Account held only account management, the header needed a My Account button and one more shortcut, and the hamburger menu, which duplicated My Account's product links, had no job left. I proposed removing it. Most competitors had already dropped it, except Betsson and BetMGM.
CRM agreed to remove the hamburger only once the header gave notifications a place. Next to My Account there was room for one more shortcut. Loyalty's designer wanted Promotions there, and the design team, me included, leaned that way. CRM wanted notifications, where players received offers made for them, and pointed out that Promotions already had another entry point while notifications had none. I agreed once they laid out the case: the argument held, and that slot did not touch the point of the initiative. With notifications in the header, the hamburger menu came out, and every other team supported the change.
Two planned features did not survive the discovery. A balance showing what was available to withdraw made no sense once a conversation with CX showed that separate balances no longer existed. An active bonuses section fell to technical constraints that came up when I spoke with engineering.
07 · Pending items
The redesign answered the problem that opened this case. When a player had something pending, a banner at the top of My Account said what was missing and linked straight to it ("Finish registering your bank account"), and a Pending tag marked the affected item, such as Verification or Limits. The pattern followed the market standard of never hiding a blocker, which the benchmark showed in its strongest form at Betano.
I added a VIP tag next to the player's name for the same reason. Talking with the VIP team, I saw that nothing in the product told players they were VIP, and many only found out when the team contacted them. The account now said it.