Z2 Live / King.com
In 2015 I rejoined the mobile game industry with Z2 Live / King.com to work on upcoming titles in their new mid-core portfolio. Bringing my expertise in free-to-play player engagement and my previous work in the army builder strategy genre, I was brought on to improve gameplay UX, develop social gameplay features, and advocate user centered design practices within the studio.
Paradise Bay
Top 150 ranked casual resource management game
Over $100M gross across 50-60M Installs
Peak DAU at 2.1M with over 90,000 concurrent
MY ROLE
I led UX design for as a Senior User Experience Designer on Paradise Bay and Rise of Tyrants, two resource management titles in King's midcore portfolio. Working alongside Lead Game Designers and Product Managers, I would facilitate UX efforts on upcoming game features and execute UX deliverables (wireframes, prototypes, and presentations) for upcoming features and business initiatives.
As the UX designer on the Paradise Bay team, a live top 150 ranked casual resource management game with over 90,000 concurrent users, I would help to reshape the product alongside the product team and help advocate for user centered design. During our time on the project the product manager (as Product Owner), lead game designer, and myself would form the core Product Team and drive a 40% increase in ARPU. We rallied the team to engage users with new monthly event driven content, optimizing increased engagement and monetization in “Trade Fests”, perform radical product experimentation tests, and would deliver the best performing ad incentives at King with over 60% of the player base engaging in incentivized ads.
Implementing new UCD ideation processes inspired by Google Design Sprints
IMPROVING USER CENTERED DESIGN
I introduced Lean UX methodologies and advocated user centered approaches towards the team's agile pipelines. Partnering with Game designers, Data Analysts, and Product managers I advocated for focusing user stories on outcomes in user behavior. Incorporating a feature hypothesis and analytic expectations with our Business Performance Unit as part of the feature work, I would help provide further insight into measuring product performance and providing further improvements. Working with the Product Team, I would develop the agenda and participate in the first Game Design Sprint (inspired by Google Design Sprints) as the team sought to tackle their next set of large scale problems.
“Tradefest Events”
Monthly week long events where players progress through multiple tiers of collection objectives for limited time content.
Improvements to event driven content and social experiences
I collaborated with stakeholders in the product and design teams to implement new UX patterns to improve engagement and monetization in live events and social experiences in Paradise Bay. Working with Game Design, we provided new features and planning targeted at long-term scalability while we extended the current feature set and aggressively tested with new experiments across a wide audience. I applied player dynamics and psychology to promote social gameplay motivations by adding social contracts and rewards through features like player gifting.
Sunshine Challenges are a daily challenge system that improve short term goals per session and push players towards their next milestone.
Events and limited time engagements are key drivers to Paradise Bay's long term success.
LONG-TERM PLAYER GOALS AND PLAYER INSIGHTS
I facilitated insights into long-term player goals partnering with Product teams, Design leadership, the Business performance unit (analytics), marketing, and player research. Developing Z2's first set of user personas and reviewing results from our first set of qualitative research efforts, I would help to refine long-term player goals with Product managers and Game designers to deliver features such as Sunshine Challenges (daily objectives), event management, and be a key stakeholder in considerations towards improvements to player onboarding.
Paradise Bay Player Journey and milestones from Level 1-30
Work
Initial UX for players that have access to the Ad Bird. Ad bird is a parrot that occasionally will arrive on the player land. Announcing itself as a quest, players quickly learn that completing an Ad Parrot quest will always guarantee a reward of gems or resources.
As part of the core loop, players quickly move into a flow of rapidly moving from activity to activity. Once a player reaches a point of impasse (timers are too long or storage is at capacity) players have a chance to watch an ad to continue progress and potentially extend their game session.