Increase egagement through advergaming
Background
KFC is one of the biggest brands in Japan and the account is run by Hakoudo Japan. They wanted to run a new campaign to advertise the new limited edition (Ebi-Fry). Games are quite large in Japan and Hakoudo wanted to way to measure engagement time with the campaign and link with the store visits to identify clear ROIs. The main challenge here was the fact that developing an app was out of the questions. The cost to build the app, the multi devices that exist in Japan only and the fact that the game needed to available at certain times of the day and be pulled immediately when needed made it hard to go with an easy solution to create a simple advergame app.
The team decided to try another technology that gave the brand the freedom and total control over the game yet support cross platform gaming. HTML5 was the best suggsted solution.
Role
Head of Design, Team Lead, Product Manager. Managed inhouse developers team, game developers team and laizaied with Hakoudo
So many mobile devices exist in Japan. What is the best technology to use here!
RESEARCH
How can we answer the biggest challenge? How to drive users to the store! How to push the user to convert from a player to a paying customer and how can we push the users to share th game.
The team started by brainstorming ideas and solutions. indicating what the proposed flows can be.
Service Maps- Taking the customer from the Street to the game to the street again
DEFINING
The team proposed for the game to run in a webview in the existing KFC Japan App,=. This ensured that the game is hosted in our servers and we have total control. The app will identify when the user is in proximity to any KFC branch and notify the user of the secret game that is unlocked by passing colonel. The user is able to play the game and finish it with a roll of gotcha which i popular Japanese game mechanics to roll for an upgrade.. The player then might win a voucher that he can share with a friend or challenge a friend for a double or nothing.
With Device ID, session ID and unique voucher ID all linked to branch location and user coordinates of the session events and purchase events we were able to identify the whole user journey of where users play, how long does it take them to play the game after being notified and what are the branches that are most poplar for redemption as well as the percentage of the vouchers that were redeemed together. The nice outcome surprise is that KFC could identify the main routes its users are taking and figure out better placement for more effective billboards.
User Flow and persona
User Physical touch points
How to create an app that appears to a large segment of users with different background and aesthetic appeal!
MANAGING THE TEAM
I lead 2 teams to perform this project, The web team who created the infrastructure for the campaign and the game team who created the game itself. The later was an outsourced team based in Poland. In order to make sure all the teams are on the same page we used user story mapping techniques, we ran daily scrum meetings, shared backlog refinement and weekly demo reviews.
Backlog refinement workshops
Continious team collaboaration
DEFINING
Managing the design of the campaign was harder than expected. The brand is a well established one with very strict design guidelines yet we needed to make sure that the art was compatible with the game so we needed to work with a specialised game artist. This proved hard since I needed to find one that spoke Japanese yet had experience with HTML5 art game creation and could do the needed sprites. Luckily I found a reliable one through Elance and contracted him to do all the work with the help of Hakoudo campaign manager to make sure that we are following the brand guidelines.
campaign Design
Users play testing the game
Users play testing the game
RESULTS
he campaign was very successful and read great results.
Official campaign KPIs
The team decided to go with lean UX and fast approach to validate and iterate on the idea and gather all stakeholders in teh rom to reach fast solutions.
Research methodologies: Interviews. Surveys. Focus groups, concept testing, Moderated Remote Usability Studies
Methodologies used