HiDef Ent. Inc. | Feb 2022 - Sept 2022
With advertising as Snapchat’s primary source of revenue and growing competition in mobile engagement, they needed another way to diversify their revenue. Games became the obvious answer. With a newly inked co-publishing deal with Snap Inc, how could we attract, engage, and retain their 319m daily active users? I led UX to conceptualize core gameplay with additional compulsion loops and design how players would onboard to the first ever standalone Snapchat mobile game experience.
My Role
Responsible for user experience, discovery, ideation, interaction design, prototyping and cultural strategy. Consulted on user research.
Team
Todd B, Game Design
Michelle H, Art
Chris C, Product
Andrew P, Engineering
Chip L, Production
Snap Inc. sought to monetize their existing audience through a completely new experience. Their current avenues were built on Snapchat’s ability to keep their audience engaged through curated culturally relevant content — most of which is UGC (user generated content). We endeavored to attract, engage, and retain their daily active users but off-platform and with much less dependency on UGC.
Snap Inc provided us with in-depth analysis on their daily active users. Everything from who they were to what they liked and how/why they engaged with the Snapchat platform. I combed through hundreds of pages of information, being sure to take note of the particular behaviors, motivations, and interests.
Here are few things that stood out to me:
51%
of Snapchat users
are female
52%
of Snapchat users
are ages 13-24
70%
or more play with or
view AR filters daily
86%
use it to keep in touch
with friends & family
I collaborated with VGM, internal publishing, and art departments to help launch qualitative and quantitative research initiatives. These aimed to understand player interests in music genres, art styles, and game descriptions, as well as their overall gameplay experience (using very early prototypes). Each question I formulated had a specific intent in extracting valuable player insights a that I communicated to VGM, allowing them to help refine and tailor our survey, removing any unintended bias.
Project Dance needed to feel like an extension of Snap Inc’s social network. That wouldn’t be possible without a deep dive into Snapchatters favorite and most engaged features. I led the mapping of Snapchat’s features and facilitated internal presentations on their functions and cultural implications with intentions of identifying natural integration points for potential future game features.
After gathering several data points on Snapchat’s DAU through provided material, our own survey, and 3rd party research, a high level profile was created to describe the average user the game needed to engage.
Target: GenZ and Millennials who mostly identify as female, value and crave creative expression, social responsibility, building communities, celebrating individuality, and nurturing friendships.
Their interests and behaviors were mapped to motivations and used to inform our features. Using Game Refinery, games with matching audiences were easy to uncover. Reviewing data and features from those games exposed several regularly occurring and overlapping features known to help attract and retain gamers with specific motivations. I took note of those motivations and collaborated with the a multidisciplinary team to ideate features that would speak to each within the context of our partnerships.
I researched popular games that resonated with our target audience. From those learnings, I noted how each product presented similar engagement mechanism that later served as foundational knowledge in identifying possible experiences within our feature set.
Social features and building communities have become more popular in what have previously been traditionally been single-player genres.
Renovation/ Decoration elements appear in 49% of the US top-100 grossing iOS Match3 games, vs 7% just 6 years ago.
BeatStar is in the Top 200 grossing games on iOS in the US since its release in Aug’21. Pop music is cited as a key to success.
Successful user acquisition ads featuring mini-game type experiences are trending and are now influencing game design
I was primary owner and designer of the core loop and later worked with several disciplines to create additional loops for meta layers that supported player motivations we previously identified.
Early prototyping kicked off with a focus on core gameplay. With rhythm gameplay mechanics from Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and BeatStar considered as a north star, we built iterative prototypes to define and refine both our song-specific level authoring process and feedback loops between game and player.
I was directly responsible for intaking product requirements and goals from our product owner and translating them into actionable user stories, wireframes, and asset requests that were then entered into JIRA and actioned against.
Throughout each iteration, comparison videos were created to assess difficulty, timing, and feedback loops. I led our team's video review, complemented by internal playtesting, to gather valuable insights that would later populate our backlog.
Though BeatStar’s experience provided a foundational blueprint for rhythm gameplay on mobile in portrait orientation, we still had significant hurdles to overcome in contextualizing gameplay thematically for dance and Snap Inc.’s Bitmoji IP.
Where could we display the user’s Bitmoji to keep its appearance significant while not distracting the player’s focus from gameplay objectives?
Other contributing
factors we considered
In the end I tried several more permutation of this layout, however, the Snapchat ad platform was incompatible with landscape orientation and required that the solution exist within portrait orientation. The answer came in the form of something far simpler. We added a second experience to gameplay that would require the player to engage directly with the IP itself unimpeded by any additional UI. I could then treat the Bitmoji as an additive element during rhythm gameplay.
Gesture swipe gameplay allowed the player’s Bimoji to dance to the song by drawing sets of patterns within a limited time frame. The player had 3 seconds per pattern in a dance move to draw them before they disappear. The faster and more acurately the player draws these patterns, the more points they earned.
Onboarding players included several significant hurdles. I led the creation of the FTUE (first time user experience), walking the player through the first moment of opening the application, including: logging in, creating an account, using a guest account, and playing their first few rhythm stages.
Our documentation needed to be robust enough to feed a global engineering team— fidelity and accuracy were high priorities. I designed attentively annotated grey box layouts to clearly articulate a set of guided actions the player needed to make, each set accompanied by high level user stories and correlated to deeper, more specific player motivations. Within hundreds of screens, I displayed step by step instructions including the foundations for when sound, animations, transitions, text, game prompts, etc. occurred.
How do we onboard Snapchatters unfamiliar with rhythm game mechanics?
The short answer: Slowly.
Because of partner guidelines, players would eventually be required to login or create a Snapchat account to gain access to the entirety of the game, however, doing so on application-open would create a barrier to entry for many would-be players who do not identify so closely with Snapchat or have privacy concerns. Clearing my idea with Snapchat stakeholders, I suggested that first-time players would instead be introduced to a game-host who would narrate their first experiences, and provide a temporary Bitmoji character for gameplay.
That idea opened the path to fully immerse players immediately, placing them into core gameplay and teaching them the basics of the rhythm mechanics. In my first iterations, I displayed step by step instruction to guide the player without characters for simplicity.
Dance Studio was designed to provide players with a space in which they customize and show off style, achievements, and rewards. With the integration of their existing Snapchat friends list, players can visit and be visited by friends in the form of their Bitmoji. Working with Game Design and Art departments to identify dependencies, I contributed to building the experiential infrastructure that allowed player to use a HomeScapes-inspired interface, where players pick between unlock-able customizations to renovate their Dance Studio.
Unfortunately, there were several significant imposed limitations within our partner’s guidelines that prevented us from allowing players the ability to customize their Bitmoji’s outside of the Bitmoji and Snapchat platforms — meaning the only integration option I had was to bounce players back to first party applications to customize their Bitmojis. It also meant that our game could not directly reward players with customizations for their Bitmojis. From these constraints, Pets were born.
Designed as a companion avatar for every player’s bitmoji, Pets provided another form of expression as players could collect and customize a number of side-kick like characters to stand along side their Bitmojis. The game could directly reward players for their performances and progression and offer potential brand integrations for would-be partner.
As a result of Snap Inc.’s reprioritization of internal projects and teams, they halted production on all games, including Project Dance.
This was a super fun project to work on. In my official role as Director of Culture, I led the creation of content strategies that would ensure our players resonated with the type of artists and song featured in the game. Research led us to believe that rather than dividing content by genre, approaching our content implementation by aesthetic and mood would afford players a more dynamic experience and offer a deeper correlation between players’ personalities, general taste, and music selection. Studies from Spotify note that listeners are engaging more and more with genre-less playlists which they noted has easily been leveraged to focus more on discovery of emerging / independent artists.
I identified and engaged several music content and technology partnership including PRTZL-SongTradr, Song Write Club, Elias Music (Universal Music Group), and Reactional Music to better understand their potential roles in our content pipeline and stage authoring. Engaging with these partners, I developed strategies and negotiated terms to include mood-specific content, both from budding independent artists and more popular names. The inclusion of independent artists’ work would be far more cost effective and provide enough additional content to have a seemingly never ending list of artists/songs to discover and share through the core gameplay. I was very aware that our audience appreciates inclusivity and social responsibility. The visibility of independent artists would only work in our favor as an intentional add.
Working directly with a client of Snap Inc.’s stature brings unique learnings. Snap came with their own hurdles that we inherited in the form of legacy technologies, security, and business strategies. We had recurring weekly meetings to have constant and open communication to encourage the discovery of learnings related to the several challenges we faced. I learned how to communicate concerns with 3rd party stakeholders of world renown IP.
I also learned how to position solutions to stakeholders for maximum buy-in. There were many great experiences we could build with a rich feature set. However, almost every single one was costly and/or unrealistic considering the budget and deadlines. I had to determine where the real value was HiDef and it’s partners so we did not spread ourselves or contractors too thin.