Case Study: Words With Friends International
Words with Friends is a free-to-play online multiplayer word game, where players take turns building words in a crossword-puzzle style manner, strengthening vocabulary knowledge through mentally stimulating entertainment. The team was tasked with growing DAU by creating a simple UX for dual and tri-lingual players.
Discovery: Who is our core user?
Under the guidance of a UR Consultant, our cross-functional group created a mental image of who our core customer was.
Subsequently, we created a wants/needs version as a team.
Lastly, we brainstormed & hypothesized how our core persona would approach competition. The Product team then vetted that hypothesis with surveys & player interviews.
Key Outcomes: Because the entire team participated in the initial creation of the prototypical persona, the team was far more engaged in the follow through process. When the product team returned with updated information based on field research, everyone was invested in what changed and how to best approach building features for our new & revised quantitative personas.
In order to support players we knew were already playing outside the US and grow support and engagement internationally, we needed to add languages other than English for the first time. Over the course of a year, I led the design initiative to support players opting into other languages, finding new friends to play in a language they knew, and playing with friends regardless of a common language.
To support our core mandate to “do no harm” to the existing player base, I focused my user flows on player satisfaction within a started match, using completion % as my metric (rather than an increase in new matches started or in DAU.)
Key Outcomes: Organic match starts increased slowly but very steadily using minimal ad spend over multiple quarters. Completion rates maintained or increased with non en_US matches.
The team was able to observe and A/B test various UI tweaks on an engaged user population, we could then revise the feature (before increasing ad spend) and ultimately brought in a huge, new International audience for the company.
Defining: Starting matches in other languages
Case Study: With Friends Network
Zynga wanted to explore having their own social graph & social features in the event the successful partnership with Facebook faced challenges.
As part of 5 person cross-functional team, I handled all UX Design for the creation of a key social features focusing on the simple rubric of: people who play the games you like, and friends who play games you don’t.
Project Duration: 2 years
Team Size: 5 person cross functional
Defining: Wireflows of the social user journey
By basing my designs on then-current social network patterns, any features we developed felt familiar to our customers, but unique to our platform effort. I focused on 2 core pieces: a Friends List & Activity feed. This allowed us to get a small yet polished service offering built which we quickly began testing with real users in our titles to see what resonated and what needed revision.
Key Outcomes: Our 2-person engineering team was able to easily build out a concept to test in the mobile titles Cityville, and Dream Zoo. The game teams only needed to insert 1 UI entry-point. Our system tied directly into the standardized backend notification system, allowing us to inform users that a high-affinity Friend was deeply engaged in a new game the player didn’t currently play.
By integrating our “channel,” Dream Zoo was able to increase new installs 4x over ad-driven installs and our users retained at nearly 3x the rate.