Jiaqi Wu | UI/UX Designer
My Vegas Web Lobby Redesign
Refresh the lobby with data informed decisions
About the Game
My Vegas Web is a Facebook Web game that focuses on casual social casino games.
Our Facebook web game is one of our oldest yet most popular titles. With this game showing its age, it was in need of a complete redesign not only to the outdated visuals, but the entire product hadn’t evolved with the changing F2P industry trends.
Design Challenge
Modernize the entire game through a redesign
The primary challenge in restructuring and balancing all of the games features was part determining the best path forward and part aligning various stakeholders on key decisions on that new direction. Determining that path started with thorough research.
From the very beginning of the user journey in the lobby, there are many confusing design elements. For example, there’s over 60 slot games you can pick from, but you can only see 5 at once. Promotional offers are placed prominently throughout the product in different locations, however they typically led to the same destination if clicked. There were many other rarely used features that took up valuable screen space and tech resources to support.
Design Process
End Game Flow Motion Mock
Research & Insights
Competitive Analysis
We compared some of the top grossing games on Facebook to try and find out the similarities in their success.
1. Bingo Blitz
Bingo Blitz has long been one of the most popular games on Facebook. Its main game is a bingo game that's set up with a journey map that takes the player to different "cities" while unlocking different rewards, new games, and collectibles through earning performance based points.
Pros: compared to our game, Bingo Blitz has a very comprehensive on-boarding to show new users where things are. And game design wise, the game is very progress driven. The most prominent thing in the lobby screen is a giant journey map that reminds the player of their progress. Bingo Blitz also has a dedicated quest log for players to look for small goals to accomplish through playing the game. On the social side, Bingo Blitz has live leaderboard during playing the game. On a very detailed level, Bingo Blitz built in mini game for players to play while waiting for the game to load.
Cons: the negative side is mostly related to the sheer amount of information the game is trying to cramp into one screen. And that has resulted in that developers have to make flashy animation and over-saturated graphics to make things standout. Users are likely to overlook important information like newly added games or daily bonuses. There are also unused featured that's taking very valuable real estate like the chat room window.
2. Candy Crush
Candy Crush is one of the most exemplary F2P games not just on web. With 4.2M daily revenue, it has never fell off top 10 top-grossing games on any platform.
While our social casino games seem very different from games like Candy Crush on the surface, at its cores we are both using the classic F2P structure. It could be very beneficial to look at Candy Crush for F2P related designs.
Pros: with its compelling visual, juicy feedback, and well-crafted storyline, Candy Crush delivers to the player a very entertaining experience. Similar to Bingo Blitz, Candy Crush's game design is incredibly progress driven from the beginning: the prominent progress map, score system with flashy winning celebration, and varies of unlocks/props. Based on Facebook, Candy Crush's social leaderboard shows your ranking among your friends to stimulate players to replay the levels. Besides, Candy Crush game is very explorative, users discover new features every few levels which helps to build positive expectation to continued playing.
Cons: while being an incredibly popular games, it is disappointing to see that Candy Crush FB web game is not responsive at all. And while detailed on-boarding could be a huge pro, Candy Crush feels like it's babysitting the players by giving off hints to how to play the game when it detects the players have not been responsive.
3. Doubledown Casino
Doubledown Casino is one of the biggest names in social casino arena. It has been favored by millions of hardcore real casino fans since the beginning of its release.
While Doubledown seemingly like a direct competitor to our game, we found out that we actually don't share the same type of user base upon further research. Doubledown casino has been very emphasizing on authentic and real casino experience. Starting from the lobby, it's visualized like how it would look like in a real physical casino. You can play all the real casino games you can find in Las Vegas. The game doesn't have any F2P based game design like quests or progress, and it's very far away from our game direction wise.
4. Slotomania
Slotomania, among the list, is the our closest competitor. We share a lot of the same general direction in art, base game design, and product design.
Pros: in comparison to our game, Slotomania's visual has been very unified around the same theme, which makes the game seem a lot more polished. Similar to Candy Crush and Bingo Blitz, Slotomania also has strong design in the progression and social direction. There is a dedicated task hud on the left of the game play screen, and a live dashboard of tournament ranking as soon as the player is ready for it. Also compared to mobile app, Slotomania web has been given out far less pop-ups.
Cons: in contrary to other games on the list, Slotomania web is directly ported over from the mobile game. Being a complete replica of the mobile equivalent, the responsiveness is very limited. Maybe also as a side effect of this, the "Favorite" function has not been working at all. Also, the players will not be able to skip any cut scenes and this might trigger negative emotions when players get impatient.
Research & Insights
User Data Analysis
Through communicating with Marketing and UA team, we were able to accumulate some data to understand more about the trends on users habits on a larger scale.
Here are some of our core findings:
Every bet tier is accumulating chips. Our players have been hoarding chips over the time due to the lack of currency draining and all the new events we put in the game to help accumulating chips. Also, the big spender's curves seem to be fluctuating more.
Bet and Spin. In general, the average spin is going down and the average bet is going up.
Bet level. Non-Mon’s average bet level is much more consistent than monetizers (new event comes out targeting at higher level bidders).
We are losing players. Non-spent and spent player counts are both going down (15% and 36%).
Research & Insights
Old Interface Instrumentation Data
In order to learn more about how our original interface is performing, we were able to convince the web engineers to implement instrumentations onto the interface so we get an idea of what and what not our users are interacting with on the screen.
Here are some of our core findings:
1. Most of the filters are clearly under-utilized.
2. Offer cards are not getting nearly as much attraction as other UI HUDs.
3. Most of the people lost interest in Bonus Bubbly after 1 click.
4. Inbox - people who clicked on it once would be more likely to click it more
Game and Product Design
Reflect on the Findings and Theories
When reflect on all the findings and compared them to game design theories, it is very clear that F2P games and all the other addictive games have something in common:
While the top F2P differ in interface, they fundamentally share the same base game formula, social tie-ins, and progression systems. When people play these games, they are seeking a satisfying experience with a chance of winning, a social connection to other players, and being part of something bigger or popular.
Blockbuster successes like Hearthstone or Candy Crush take this concept further with tasks that reward the player at specific milestones. The reward loop is set up in such a way that it becomes a feedback loop to retain players. We have a massive opportunity to adopt these systems into our product and so in the redesign.
Consolidate Findings
Come Up with a User Journey Map
After watching hours of play through footage, we put together a general user journey map.
In general, our users enjoy the main game a lot. The main complaint we got from the players are the never-ending pop-up ads when they open the game. In fact not just for our game, for any mobile slot games the consecutive pop-ups before they even enter the game is always the biggest complaints. Also we have noticed that our players always leave the game with negative emotions - they either run out of chips to play or they feel like they are not winning in this game and intend to switch to a different game.
Affinity Mapping
The Solution
After all the research, we decided to do a few rounds of affinity mapping to get all the possible solutions out.
In summary, here are the areas of improvements we’ve found in the original game:
UX improvements:
1. Unused filter - reported by web engineers;
2. Unused friends leaderboard - slows down the game actually;
3. Unused hamburger menu on the right side of the top HUD;
4. Reward and bonus bubbly not stand out enough;
5. Does not give enough indication on where the player is in the menu system;
6. My strip always in the background - slows down the game and is not tied to the main game loop closely enough;
7. Inbox - very limited use, mixes up the functions like players would have thought to find invite in the inbox;
8. Quest progress - not really a clear way to check the progress (and it’s a really important game mechanism);
9. Declutter - not really useful information on the game cards like the “play” button;
10. Player uses “heart” to flag favorite games but it doesn’t influence the sorting order of the cards;
Game Design Improvements:
1. Built on the biggest social platform without utilizing the social feature at all, our players have no social connection in our games;
2. My Strip is a wonderful idea, but not executed well. Currently it is a fancier and more troubled version of “free coins everyday”;
Wireframing
A Decluttered and Refocused Interface
These are the areas we are trying to focus on during this exploration:
Simplify and declutter the screen. As proven by our instrumentation data, there are a lot of elements on the screen that are clearly under-utilized by users. In this process, we were trying to remove all the unnecessary features like the filters and hamburger menu. By doing this, we were also able to give more space to our game cards and offer cards.
Strengthen the progression system. While we already have a progression system, it is not really in place. We explored ways to strengthen and promote our progression system through dedicated task hub, live leaderboard, and possibly newly designed journey map.
Setting foundation for full-blown social system. In our current game, we don't actually have any social feature despite having connected to Facebook. While having a full-blown social system is completely out of scope at this moment, we were still trying to set the foundation for it by actively anticipate it in our base UX structure.
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