Increase egagement through advergaming
Background
The idea was to develop an engine that allows users with no game experience to create games of their own and publish them on their website. The solution meant to be a B2B product that brands and agencies are able to create engaging games to put on their website however after the success of the project a simpler B2C form was introduced with a collaboration with wix.com
Role
Role: Product Owner. Head of Design Create a market place for html5 games where agencies are able to Lead product owner
Methodologies used
Staffing the team, Overseeing the tender process, opening offices, User research, Market Research, Market Fit Analysis
How do you create a way to measure user brand engagement.
MVP
The stakeholders.
Since the project was a bit complex and had 5 stakeholders working together to reach the final production of a game and special care needed t be given in order to make sure that all the systems worked together and the team looked at developing a story based on a user case instead of developing the products in silos
Validate the idea
The idea started by the need of creating a better way to measure user engagement. Games are a great way to measure that since the player/brands visitors are 100% emerged in the experience.
We started the idea by wanting to create simpler and smaller games for different brands. Some of these included Pita Pit and Resene in NZ. The game was very successful and the team decided to take the experiment further. An ideal place was Japan. In Tokyo we published a very successful campaign for KFC and there the need emerged to grow and take the company into an automated solution where it can rapidly grow.
I worked very closely with the management and the business to propose a solution that satisfied the product needs.
The solution aimed at having the developers plug in their games and allowing the agencies or anyone who wants to create a game an easily and publish it on their website.
At this stage a need to hire a development company emerged. I was involved in the process of finding companies, analysing tenders, looking over projects and offers and finally closing a development company. Conducting market research to understand the viability of the product and finally choosing the right set of technology based on our need.
Tinder solutions and tender documents
Identifying project scope
THE TEAM
I helped grow the team from 2 to 20 developers and designer. Both in-house and outsourced teams.
The development house was based in Manila and since I was in Japan I was flying over for sprint planning and reviews.
Agile methodology was the best approach to be taken here. 3 weeks sprints and daily stands were helpful to make sure that development and budget are kept under control.
How do you create a way to measure user brand engagement.
MANAGING THE TEAM
The first step was to identify the main persona type and in this case and due to the complexity of the project the team identified the roles of these persons first.
- HTML5 game creators . The developers who created the base games prepare them for integration and plugged the games into the engine.
- The agency or the brand. The user who needed to create an advergame and publish it as a campaign.
- The QA: the quality assurance teams who needed to make sure that the campaigns are up to the standards
- The player : A gasified experience of a mini branded games platform. The end user who is playing the game and win a reward at the end.
Gamifications document - Level up system equation and Badges
System Flow
RESEARCH THE USERS
To map out the traits of each of the personas the UX team went on to conduct an extensive research conducting surveys with each roles to identify pain points and types, Conducted interviews with potential agency partners and onsite interviews as well as gathering a team of advisors of respectable account managers in famous agencies and well known game developers.
System Flow
Personas
KPI DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT
I identified the main flow here that links all the products together and then identified the user cases that we will be looking at and the main journeys. We decided to develop horizontally and not vertically. The teams focused on one KPI per cycle. Starting with focusong on Player aquisition feature to later on focus on retention.
After agreeing with the business KPIS to trcak and the main use cases and the main journey we started working on the feature scoping and the stories to identify the MVP for the products. The work was a collaboration between the dev teams and the design team to make sure that all the people onboard had the same understanding of what needed to be built.
Use case flow driven developement
DESIGN
The design process was a collaboration process between the agencies that we helping us and the team. The work started first by identifying the Information architecture by conducting card sorting workshops and then creating the flows, The processes and the first draft of the wireframes after going through very regressive testing.
Testing
The testing phase was long as we needed to test with multiple nationalities and backgrounds. Since the solution was supposed to serve multiple markets at the same time.
B2B success.
The project was a success and was adapted by few agencies in Japan where they started creating their own branded games and listening the solution.
B2C
Through six we could see that we needed to look at a simpler and less advanced solution.
Initial set of wireframes - Brands Access
Initial player side wireframes
C2C solution. More playful and easier to play with
Proposed design for the player side