Improving In-Game Purchase
Role
Interaction design, UX strategy, Visual design, Usability testing, Prototype.
Background
Fairway Solitaire is a solitaire-based, golf-themed card game. Developed by Big Fish Studios, the game’s Caddyshack-inspired humor and fun game mechanics contributed to its success in the mobile casual game market.
goals
To improve player’s life-time value (LTV), the team decided to tackle in-game purchase flow. Club is one of the most frequently used power-ups in Fairway. Streamline Club usage and purchase flow would boost player enjoyments as well as minimize frictions for spendings.
Design process
The process allows me to gather and distill stakeholder expectations. It helps me identify customer pain points and to find solutions. With this approach, design work is grounded in analytics, research, and observations. The process provides the confidence to take calculated risks. The 4 stages of my design process:
Stage 1: Discover
I started the project by understanding both business and user needs. I met with vision holders and leads to discuss business goals and constraints. User profiles were defined as the base to better understand user needs.
The analytic team shared insights of player behaviors on Club usage.
Stage 2: explore
Concept design
Based on the analytical findings and leveraged HCI info, I came up with hypotheses and shared with the team.
Next, I mapped out user purchase flow to communicate the distinct interactive variations between iPhone and iPad users.
Through the process of exploration and validation, a common consensus was reached in strategic and design direction.
Power-up usage hypothesis 1
Stage 3: Design & Development
The game designer, the art lead, and I started to produce detailed design solution.
Prototype
I created prototypes using proto.io for communicating design ideas and for more validations.
Visual Design
As the visual and interactive designs were shaping up, the prototype evolved to accurately reflected the production-ready state.
Feedback Loops
Due to time constraints, I relied heavily on internal feedback. While internal participants were not the first choice for validating design options, the learning on mental models are relevant.
Feedbacks were collected from breaking the Fairway team into smaller groups. I facilitated the group presentation. The team was excited about the feature and to have contributed in the design process.
Once the design was narrowed down, the prototype was updated to include more detailed mockups and interactions. High fidelity prototype was used for design reviews and stakeholder presentation.
Stage 4: Evaluate
I reviewed builds to ensure the feature meeting business and user goals. I worked closely with engineers in troubleshooting and resolving edge cases during implementation.
Post launch, I followed up with customer supports, social channel managers and analysis reports to monitor feature performance. Recommendations were provided for future improvements.
Results
Club usage and purchase revamp were on a steady uptick since week 1. iPad had the biggest impact, seeing a 60% increase on club refill per hole.