Context
At the end of 2018, I moved to New York City to join a three-month duration project with Facebook. The project happened inside ustwo’s New York studio in close collaboration with Facebook Instant Games and Messenger teams.
On ustwo’s side, we were a small team of three people, two product designers (including me) and one project manager.
Concept Development UX Strategy
The ask
-
Explore and push the boundaries of how Facebook Instant Games is represented, viewed, played, and shared. And in that, set a new North Star for this platform.
Kickoff Workshop in Seattle
WHY
To investigate and better understand Facebook's expectations, I facilitated a two days workshop in Facebook’s Seattle office. There, both ustwo and Facebook (IG and Messenger) stakeholders were present.
THE OUTCOME
After sharing different opinions, diverging, and brainstorming ideas together, the team was ready to converge by grouping the ideas and voting for what we believed to be interesting focus areas according to the vision Facebook had for its platform.
HMW offer a better games’ discovery experience to users?
HMW make the sharing of games’ content more meaningful?
HMW support users to find (and interact) people to play with?
HMW build a strong gaming community?
Focus Areas
The four chosen focus areas were: Discovery, Sharing, Social Play, and Community.
It meant that we would spend the next 2 months exploring possible concepts and interactions for each one of them on a 2-week sprint basis.
On the right side, you can see the HMW that served as the foundation for each sprint.
Sprints
During the sprints, we created several concepts that later on were chosen by the team, together with Facebook stakeholders to compose the final concept.
I’m happy to share some of the concepts that were created during the sprints.
USING GAMIFICATION TO CREATE A MORE MEANINGFUL EXPERIENCE
DiscoverEngage DataChallenge of the weekThe goal Facebook had for this platform, until the moment we started collaborating, was to get it populated with games by independent game developers. As there were no clear guidelines or quality assurance, many poor-quality games were developed. Games that users would play for little time until they got tired/frustrated and decided to move to the next one.
Besides the Game Guidelines and better Monetisation Strategies (a project I collaborated on with Facebook later on in 2020), we proposed using gamification as the foundation of the platform.
Gamifying the platform would give to users the sense of progress that the games were lacking. An important factor for users’ retention.
Above you can see a mock-up created to represent the concept. Using Facebook stories, every level of IG would be composed of four challenges:
1 Discovery: To support the Discovery of good quality games.
2 Engage: Focused on Social Play where people would be invited to play with or beat their friends’ high scores.
3 Data: To encourage users to come back to the platform we decided to gamify some data, such as the amount of time they have spent on the platform.
4 Challenge of the week: A place where Facebook could promote new games.
USING FACEBOOK STORIES TO CREATE A MORE ENGAGING EXPERIENCE
One of the challenges Facebook IG was facing, was to deliver a good games’ discovery to its users on iOS. This is due an Apple’s policy that limits the possibilities that other games’ stores have on their platform.
Using Facebook stories not only solved the problem Facebook was having on iOS but also helped us to create a more engaging experience. Users don’t need to search for games anymore, they can receive suggestions based on their preferences, games that their friends are playing and, games Facebook wanted to promote.
Using Facebook stories not only solved the problem Facebook was having on iOS but also helped us to create a more engaging experience. In this case, users wouldn’t need to search for games as they would receive suggestions based on their preferences, games their friends are playing, and games Facebook wanted to promote.
According to Facebook’s researchers, IG was perceived as spammy by its users. This is due to how sharing was happening on the platform:
1 In order to attract more players, game developers were encouraging users to share with their friends, information about games that were perceived as uninteresting. As a reward, players would get a game booster.
2 The way people would receive this uninteresting information on Facebook was through private messages. Creating a lot of confusion as there was no hierarchy or clear grouping of information between regular messages and gaming messages.
CREATING A MORE VALUABLE SHARE
To create a more valuable share, we proposed adding a personalized experience showing the successes or failures of users. The idea was to add a facial reaction together with the gameplay.
Different ways of communication were explored during the Social Play sprint. As we were exploring the possibility of users playing with people they knew or not, it could be that users would end up on a game with strangers or people from different parts of the globe that not necessarily speak the same language.
EXPLORING COMMUNICATION WHILE PLAYING
This concept uses a game mechanic called, non-verbal and mechanically driven communication. Users can only express themselves using a pre-defined set of reactions.
It helped us to explore social play without removing the users’ privacies. It can also be very fun to have to express yourself with a limited amount of reactions.
Responsibilities