Project 1

UX Vision

Build a positive and fun social experience for players to create a sense of community.

Why?

Through user research and play testing, we've discovered that players have been having a negative social experience in game due to the competitive nature of it. Since sense of community is such an important element in any online game, we've set out to correct that with this feature.

How?

Create a coop feature that ties in with the core loop
Make pairing and working with friends an enjoyable and frictionless experience
Highlight social interaction in the feature with juicy feedback

The Problem

Our core loop consists of players rolling on the Monopoly board to trigger events in the game and earn currencies to upgrade their landmarks. Building landmarks to advance to the next map is the main progression system in the game. And our core social loop consists of players attacking each other, because it is entirely negative, it is reported from play testing that players hate having friends in the game. Some even proactively delete friends in the game.

Research shows having a robust social network built in a game is essential to the longevity of it, players having 4 or more friends in the game is more likely to stay in the game for longer.

The goal of this feature is to show players the value of having friends in the game through engaging gameplay and attractive rewards, to incentivize players to have more friends in the game, and to offset the negative social experience they've had so far.

Ideation & Iteration

Working with the Product Manager, we first mapped out the flow for this feature. Players would first go through a pairing system to form partnerships. For players that already have lots of in-game friends, this will be a good opportunity to strengthen the bond, and for players that don't have a lot of in-game friends, we hope this system will serve as a channel to find friends through the partnership. After the pairing, players will be thrown into a grand festival where they will be driven to make progresses on their "attractions" with their partners and get generous rewards that are otherwise rare to see in game.

With the flow chart in mind, we mapped out the basic navigation of this feature. Here are some of the considerations we had in mind while designing the main navigation of the feature:

Rely on the existing system whenever possible. Compared to our regular live events, this one is a rather outlier in that it has a layer of gameplay plus the social element. We want to ease the learning curve by relying on our already established structures whenever possible.
Have prominent surfacing for the feature within the game. Although being a relatively new game, our game is packed with features. There are a lot of things happening on the screen, we want to make sure this feature stands out.
Make sure the sense of progression and reward structure are well presented. Being two of the main drivers of why players play any game, we think the sense of progression and goal are the key elements of ensuring the success of this feature.

Explorations

With the skeleton of the feature settled, we set out to flesh out the details and different states of each screen. Generally, we start out with a few different versions, through internal or external play test we gather feedback and iterate on them with the goals we set as our beacon.

Here are some of the examples of explorations:

Case 1: Information Hierarchy & Interaction Design Exploration

Core Problem

As the most important screen in the entire feature, this screen is critical in a lot of ways. First we want to ensure that the screen has the right information hierarchy: there are a lot of information we are trying to pack into the screen, the rewards you are getting for this level, the grand prize, the social panel that contains you and your partner's contributions, the current progress, the contribution CTA, and the current level of your attraction. With all of them fighting over player's attention, we made different versions and presented to our player group to get some initial feedback.

Playtest and Feedback

Through rounds of play test, we've learnt an important yet simple lesson: there's limited space on the screen and with our player base usually having shorter attention span, something's gotta go. With countless discussion with stakeholders and game design, we've decided to only present the most essential information (current progress, next reward, social panel, and contribute CTA) on the screen and display other things contextually.

Another critical feedback we got from play test, however heartbreaking, is it is rather a laborious and boring task to contribute.

"I get through the flow okay, it's just the contribution process is not much fun."

--- Internal Playtester

To address the feedback, we created multiple interaction prototypes to try and make contribution more fun. In the end we decided to add a randomization factor in, so instead of just coming in and press buttons to add tokens into the attraction, now every contribution is like opening a loot box. To visualize the randomization, we made the button a wheel you can spin.

Case 2: Utility or Fun?

Core Problem

We never had an utility issue with the match making pop up. However, through play test we have received numerous feedback on the feature being a bit dry. When asked to rate the social interaction of the feature, most people thought it was close to none. Players feel like they are playing with a faceless bot or would rather play with a bot.

So in these explorations, our goal was to make the matchmaking a bit more fun. To highlight the human element in it, instead of a list style, we explored card style which feels a lot more personal. Through prototyping and testing, we landed on the simplest dating app style card design.

Prototype & Play Test

To test out the more finalized flow, we made simple clickthrough prototypes first for internal testing. After getting general positive feedback from internal play test, we moved onto in engine prototype and worked with our user research team to conduct usability testing with some potential real users.

Usability Play Test with Real Players

Feedback & Iteration

With the longitudinal study that spanned over 10 days with 40 players, we got to see players interact with our game in a day to day setting. Here are some of the key findings from the play test:

We designed a zoomed out view of the entire map with the idea that players will be able to easily compare the progress of each attraction and decide on which one to contribute to. However, in play test players usually had made up their mind before they even enter the view. So we ended up removing the zoomed out view from the design.
There are some surfacing issues, with so much information we are trying to communicate we found that players sometimes miss important key milestones of the feature. To solve this, we did an audit of the screens to clean out unnecessary information and identified quieter moments in the game such as "low on rolls" to deliver important celebratory animation like attraction complete to make sure players are aware of their progresses.