The game to create beautiful spaces with real brands.
/ OVERVIEW /
Design Home, the top grossing home design mobile game, saves the exclusive relaxing creative space for interior design amateurs to express unlimited talents. Among the massive mobile games, Design Home differs itself from most of others with real brand furniture options and realistic visual style. It's a game where players enjoy their me-time in the mid of busy life, it's also an app where users can take great learnings on creating pleasant space.
The 3-year old game own a solid number of long-term players since its release. On the other hand, regarding to its innovation, the learning curve is relatively higher for new players. The current New User Flow did perfectly on teaching the players how to play this game. To explore more cohort, it's time to tell the potential players why they’d love to play this game.
Design Home video pitch Rendered by Brandon Jones, Created by Bethany Vaughan
/ BACKGROUND /
2019, I worked tightly with the creative director, product manager, production and client engineering team to roll out the post NUF new player checklist. On that note, it’s the first time we introduce a goal system into the game. Validating through the A/B test, it raised the early and mid retention metrics about 10%. In the meanwhile, we threw this new feature into the User Experience Research(UXR) team to have a comprehensive overview of the current New User Flow.
Here are some of the problems we found:
- New players were getting confused by the convoluted relationship between design value, room value, and level;
- New players wanted to feel rewarded for their creativity;
- Players were not knowing when the tutorial would come to an end and began to grow impatient;
- Players felt not having enough variety in items to fulfill the theme.
Hence, the product team decided to get back to drawing boards and revamp the new user flow.
/ GOALS /
1. Tell new players the value proposition of Design Home;
2. Increase NUF completion and Day 1 retention;
3. Create a pleasant onboarding experience the excites the new players to continue playing.
/ PROCESS /
To the beginning, the cross-functional team gathered together with an offsite exercise. Product, creative, UXR, production, content, marketing, art, client engineer team contributed insights on the onboarding experience.
After that, I, as the UX/UI designer, have worked tightly with the creative director and product manager to make the high quality and fidelity new user flow. I made all of the UI wireframes, animated transitions. To deliver the best prototype for user testing, me and the user researcher put in great amount of efforts to iterate on the flow.
After 1 competitive study and 3 RITE studies, this new user flow is now on its final competitive study and early status of the implementation, where I will work with product manager and engineers for multiple phases of the implementation.
/ DESIGN SOLUTIONS /
#1 New User Intro Video
#2 Personalized Reward Bundle
#3 Tutorial Progress
#4 Conversational Tooltip
#5 Dynamic Teaching Moments
#6 Design Value Animation
#7 Post NUF New Player Checklist
/ AFTER WORDS /
Onboarding experience is universal project for any app. A large scale revamp is nothing easier than build a new flow. I feel honored to design the new NUF MVP with my super talented teammates, especially Barlow Gilmore, Jaini Shah, and Rosey D'Angelo.