King is a leading interactive entertainment company for the mobile world, with people all around the world playing one or more of those games. King has developed more than 200 fun titles, and offers games that are enjoyed all around the world. King franchises include Candy Crush, Farm Heroes, Pet Rescue, and Bubble Witch. King has 271 million monthly active users as of Q2 2020 across the web, social and mobile platforms.
Candy Crush Royalty Program
Gain behind-the-scenes access to your favorite games,
read exclusive interviews with game designers, and access exclusive rewards.
About King
Business Objective
The strategic objective of the Candy Crush Royalty Program is to decouple distribution and payments allowing us to transact directly with our player, this enables us to get significantly improved margin economics across all platforms.
The challange
Changing players existing in-app purchase behavior and convincing them to use the new platform.
Solution
Recognize and reward the most important players. By joining the Candy Crush Royalty Program players can collect points on all in-game items purchased via player’s Candy Crush Royalty Program account, and exchange those points for rewards players love!
Once the user has created a Royalty account, will connect it to the player’s profile player use in their game, and from then on player purchases will be delivered, tracked, and rewarded!
Project Structure
Before delving into the content, I wanted to start by highlighting how we structured the project. Additional to the double diamond product development process, I’ve developed and added a new product development process called “golden circle” which includes evaluation, reflection, impact, next steps, and takeaways from the project.
Introduction
My cross-functional partners
What I have done:
Design systems, UI Design, components, wireframes, mockups, prototypes, and more to communicate interaction and design ideas. Helped UXers for interviews, and testing activities to get closer user insights.
Tools I have used:
Pen & Paper, Sketch, Zeplin, Invision, Photoshop, Jira, Slack, and Caramel Frappuccino 😉
01. Discover
The three methods helped me gain a good understanding of the problem space.
Competitive Analysis
– What are some of the existing solutions out there?
– Game players are happy with the existing in-app purchase model?
– What are some of the strengths and weaknesses of the existing solutions?
Survey
– We need to get more quantitative data to understand the in-app purchase behavior of – users.
– What are our players looking for and what makes the process easier for them?
Interview with 9 game players
– What is the typical game playing session?
– What are the players’ views on spending money on Candy Crush Saga?
– What is the one thing that makes players come to Candy Crush Royalty Program?
– Technical requirements and constraints.
02. Define
Key Findings
– 90% of Candy Crush Saga players are older than 21
– 58% women players
– Players play Candy Crush for three hours or more a day
– 85% of participants mentioned that they want to be treated differently as they are loyal and long time game players.
– 75% of participants mentioned that they can make in-app purchases through the new platform.
– 90% of participants want to use the app regularly and be part of the Candy Crush Royalty Program.
– All players would also like to earn points for game loyalty
Persona
03. Develop
User flow
Low fidelity mockups
User journey with high fidelity mockups
04. Design
Design Systems
05. Deliver
After the discovery stage and defining our goals based on our key findings, within 2 months we shipped our first MVP.
06. Evaluation
After launching our MVP, we conducted usability testing with 10 players. Users are all in their 35-54s and existing Candy Crush game players, having full-time jobs.
We asked participants to complete the following tasks in usability testing.
– Sign Up, Purchase, Review Reward, Update Profile, Homepage Exploration,
Buy More Gold Bars, Natural Exploration.
After completion of the tasks, we asked our participants to rate the prototype on a scale of 1-10 according to satisfaction of use and how likely they can use the platform when they purchase game boosters. The results we obtained were:
Usability Testing Key Findings
– Research uncovered 2 High issues, 7 Medium issues, and 2 Low issues.
– Too many steps to purchase gold bars compared to current experience and expectations.
– Some reluctance to enter credit card details.
– Players valued the rewards that were game-specific over 3rd party rewards.
– Would also like to earn points for game loyalty (time spent playing and achieving levels)
– An ideal reward program would be tiered so players can redeem or build up their points for high-value rewards.
– Credentials should be remembered and synced with the native capabilities of their device for sign-in and purchases.
The main finding from the user testing was the navigation bar. 90% of our users confused on the homepage to find the navigation. As all players play their games on mobile, they looked for the same mobile navigation bar at the bottom, instead of on the top left corner.
Another key finding was also to purchase flow. It was long, confusing, and not informative.
07. Reflection
After getting the usability testing feedbacks, we evaluated our entire user flow and the design and iterated.
– Sign-up and purchase journey re-designed and steps reduced.
– Navigation manure-designed and replaced from man burger menu to more visible scrollable nav bar on top.
– Rewarding players for their loyalty and achieving levels re-considered.
– Game-specific rewards added.
– Created a tiered-based program for redeeming rewards to increase engagement and give the players more control.
08. Impact
After a successful month in Alpha, we have achieved our target of 2K players, we are now embarking on our next milestone with iteration based on our user feedback and user testing. The conversion rate for new signups increased from %30 to %50. Overall satisfaction of use also improved from 7/10 to 9/10.
09. Future Steps
Over the next month, we will be scaling up the number of users as well as releasing the new features outlined below:
– User account capacity increasing from 2K to 22K
– Friend Invite via SMS and email.
– User feedback via Google Form
– 31K Facebook Emails
10. Takeaways
– I built more UX skills with interviews and usability testings.
– I had a chance to use my UI skills and learned a lot from the game design team to enhance my visual design skills within design systems.
– Deep-dived into the material design and delivered my first official project with card components.
– Enhanced my skills in responsive web design.
– Learned one more time that users are always first
