Gold Mania
JAN 2020-APR 2020
For the second industry project at Master of Digital Media program, I collaborated with Truly Social Games, a mobile game company in Vancouver to improve the user experience of one of their live games, Gold Mania, based on data analytics.
Key Achievements and Responsibilities
Leverage game data and research findings to generate innovative ideas of enhancing game engagement, player retention and monetization. Develop and communicate ideas with storyboard, wireframes, and high-fidelity UI mockups.
Create and refine prototypes rapidly using Figma. Organize and conduct user testings to evaluate design solutions.
In thirteen weeks, the team delivered an interactive prototype of the optimized game experience with new mechanics and improved aesthetics.
Objectives
The primary objective of the project was to explore ideas that would help Truly Social Games to improve the user experience of Gold Mania. Our goal was to use and analyze data from the game and come up with unique ways to:
Boost organic installs
Increase user engagement
Increase user retention
Exploring possibilities of generating revenue through different streams
Map different metrics to track user engagement
Problem Analysis
The team did extensive research by analyzing data, playing the game itself and comparing the experience with other games. Some major problems that caused friction point in the game were identified through a fish bone analysis.
We concluded several factors that contributed to the low user engagement especially felt by casual players who had short sessions and dropped quickly. We prioritized the problems according to the defined project objectives and decided to focus on the following aspects:
Implement a more friendly on-boarding process for better FTUE
Design new game mechanics that enhance the sense of progression and offer instant gratification for all players
Improve the user interface with new aesthetics
Ideation
For the ideation phase, the team used methods and principles from Design Sprint to come up with a series of new ideas to achieve project objectives:
Introduce new Arcade gameplay mechanics, token/ticket economy, tiered store for prize redemption
Improve existing Tournament gameplay mechanics and redesign leaderboard UI
Revamp on-boarding experience, incorporate play-to-learn walkthrough and appointment mechanics
Enhance aesthetics, offer player profile customization and achievements
Introduce incentivized advertisements for monetization
Solution: Redemption Mechanics
To overcome current challenge of lacking sense of progression in the game while keeping the development cost low, the team decided to add the redemption mechanics and a new tiered store as the main solution and MVP.
With redemption mechanics in place, the player's score will be converted into tickets that can be used to redeem virtual and real prizes from the new tier-based store. We believed these new systems can reduce confusions, provide instant gratification and make the game more engaging.
Design Process
Once our ideas were approved by the client, Scrum Methodology was used to break our project into small sprints. Each sprint had a duration of four days with sprint planning and retrospectives.
In each sprint, we selected key user stories and rapidly prototyped and tested the user interfaces with sketches and wireframes. Low-fidelity mockups were transformed to high-fidelity ones using Figma after four rounds of testing and iteration.
Prototype Testing
I took the responsibility of organizing all testing sessions and collaborated with the team to conduct the testings and analyze feedback. Key user stories and features that had been tested were:
Prize reward mechanics: A/B testing with 30 users
On-boarding experience: A/B testing with 10 users
Daily reward system: Interview with 18 users
Tiered store and Tournament gameplay: Usability testing with 20 users
Final interactive prototype: Usability testing with 6 users
Based on the user feedback, we validated that our design solutions could help improve the game experiences in terms of player engagement compared with the current implementation.
Conclusions and Takeaways
The team believes that the redemption system may help Gold Mania and other similar casual games, as it gives an arcade-like experience to the game. The team thinks that the tokenized economy supplemented with incentivized advertisements will help a game in the long run as it motivates players to continue to play the game without forcing them to buy tokens from the store.
We also believes that the redemption mechanics and the token economy can be implemented on any other game without changing its core mechanics. The costs involved are relatively low, given the long-term benefits and returns it can generate.
