Create, Play & Share Games
My role
Product Designer - UX Strategy,
Concept Development, Wireframes
User Experience, Visual Design
Team
Elisa Sassi, Creative Direction
Sara Bianchetti, UX
Jack Bentley, UI
BuzzGames is a game creation platform that brings people together to create, play and share games without coding. With its three core pillars - Creation, Play and Social, it's a place where creative minds, gaming enthusiasts and social butterflies come together.
Our vision is to enable anyone to create fun games through this simple, fun and flexible game maker.
As a product designer, I focused on transforming the overall experience to improve engagement models and innovate the creation experience in an easier-to-use and fun way.
The problem
Our creation platform faces a significant issue:
There are far more players than creators, low participation in game creation.
- Primarily because features and functionality were prioritized over focus and clarity, creators find the tools overwhelming and struggle to use them effectively.
- Insufficient promotion of UGC and the reward system limited the visibility and engagement.
The problem discourages creators from engaging in game creation, reduces the variety of content available to players, and hinders community growth, leading to lower engagement and retention. Over time the target users become unclear and inconsistent with the company's vision to empower creators.
With all that in mind, we decided to be more ambitious and redesign the app to improve the overall experience and bridge the gap between being a casual player and becoming a creator.
To minimize disruptions for existing users and gather ongoing feedback, we decided to carry out the redesign gradually.
Content Inventory and Audit
Sara and I started putting together a map of the app, reviewing the content inventory for relevance and accuracy, assessing the quality and consistency. The goal was to have a centralized and organized view of the content landscape to help us make informed decisions on what to keep, revise, or remove during the redesign process.
Empathize the users
What our current user base
was saying
We arranged interviews with other product team members who had been using BuzzGames for some time, to understand where the key friction points were and what they liked about the existing design.
We also sent out an anonymous survey to our entire consumer group to find out how people enjoy playing BuzzGame. We received over 70 responses, which generated very valuable insights that helped uncover what they found frustrating, what they found valuable, and what they wished for a more enjoyable experience in the app.
Here's what we learned.
The Nice
The not so nice
Users enjoy playing fun and quick games with other people
Simple and instant creation welcomes anyone to express themselves
New arcade games are becoming popular super fast
Users are willing to watch ads and spend currency in order to receive better assets
Game Lab is not simple or fun enough to play with
No place for creators to promote their games or receive satisfying feedback on their creations
Not catering to solo or collaborative players
The social aspect doesn't foster meaningful connections or a strong sense of community
Top mentioned feedback and suggestions we collected
Usability study of creation tools
With a focus on empowering creators, we prioritized enhancing the usability and fun of our creation tools. We utilized our internal designer meetups to conduct several rounds of remote multiple-user testing.
- In the initial round, users were asked to explore Game Lab. The focus was on evaluating how easy is to start a creation, is the UI clear, what do they like and dislike of the process of creating a game.
- Subsequent rounds focused on selecting specific game templates to evaluate creation flow, the UI feel and the playing experience.
After processed all the feedback from the testing, here are the high level key findings:
Game teardown from
Consultancy & Analytics Team
The consultancy team access to data across the entire company ecosystem, it is based on insights gathered to evaluate hundreds of game apps. Fortunately, we were able to get their support at the time, the app had been extensively tested by the team and we gained an in-depth breakdown of findings and recommendations for improvement.
Lack of feedback loops &
reinforcement mechanics
The feedback mechanisms are not sufficiently engaging and satisfying for users, leading to low engagement.
UGC is not effective at driving user progress
Level 5 has the biggest drop from the previous level, right after unlocking UGC.
- No discernable difference in content and a lack of push for UGC
- Users no longer find rewards appealing as a reason to progress
Low participation in game creation
Fewer users are creating games compared to those who continue playing games after reaching level 4
Low engagement in social aspect
12% of users (who started >1 week ago) have engaged with chat and gifts.
- Lack of Identification of user motivations
- unclear social rewards
- limited group interaction
Understand and define users
In order to get a general understanding of who our users are, we worked with data team to look at demographics data to understand how users' gender, age, country and other characteristics impact user behaviour.
Meanwhile, we started conducting several empathy workshops involving stakeholders and functional teams to define users and future user journey.
So what can we do about it?
With a deeper understanding of our users and solid alignment within the team, we started exploration, ideation, prototyping and testing. In the end, we thought about some changes we believe could bridge the gap between being a casual player and becoming a creator.
Focus 1
Create IS play
The act of creating a game must be lightweight,
effortless and feel like magic.
The lines between playing and creating are blurred.
Light modding
Use familiar gestures to introduce
people into game creation.
Keep it light, fun and shareable.
Easy to advance
Progressive onboarding,
tempt people into small actions to
keep adding to their game.
Simplicity is key
Make creation engaging
and make a blank canvas
less intimidating.
Swipe to explore
Draw your Path
Draw to Populate
Focus 2
Valuable engagement
Give our users a reason to keep coming back for more.
From desirable new assets and rewards to
frequently updated tailored content.
Tailored content
Surface relevant and personal content to users based on their playing habits.
Solo progression
Give the same level of attention and value to users who don’t want to play socially.
To keep things interesting we could have multiple maps to play in, characterized by a theme. Since we have people from all over the world we could also have monthly settings that explore different regions/cities in the world.
Region Event / Seasonal: Halloween
Profile Stats and customization
Users can easily view their
statistics on their creations, playing stats and achievements as a player, as well as customizing their profile.
More game templates and assets
Expanding the range of user-generated content templates can provide creators with more creative options to express
themselves and contribute to the game's ecosystem. Ever-growing asset library provides unique and style-consistent game assets for creators to create anything they can imagine.
Focus 3
A sense of community
Allow for the BuzzGames space to
become a safe place for people with various interests
to find like-minded people
Rewarding system
A system that rewards and celebrates user milestones and creativity.
Adding Likes, Comments, badges and creator stories/tips to create a rewarding environment for people to encourage and support each other, no matter what their goals are
Social engagement
Chat opens social barriers and enables easier social interactions, the updated Chat allows users to access ongoing and past matches in one place, start new matches, create groups, etc...provides greater meaning into the existing social systems
Seasonal contests /
Tournaments / Leagues
Fostering a sense of community, allowing them to interact, collaborate, and compete with each other.
Give users inspiration and frequent new reasons to engage with the community.
More Visions
Tap into the power of game creation,
and make something bigger…
Explore the path further
As more people discover the ability to create games and witness firsthand the joy it brings both themselves and others, we are confident that they will want to take it further and start using the game engine.
AI is on our side
Opening up the possibilities of AI within lightweight creation will allow us to present limitless fresh content back to users and give creators a new level of self expression.
AI is on our side
Opening up the possibilities of AI within lightweight creation will allow us to present limitless fresh content back to users and give creators a new level of self expression.
Prompt to asset
Smart doodle
Photo to avatar
Result
After gradually rolling out new experiences and cooperating with marketing activities, we have been carefully tracking user engagement and behavior.
- A significant increase in the number of games created, and an increase in the total number of creators, especially with Gen Z users.
- People are engaging more with social systems that previously had lower usage.
- D30 retention increased by 24%.
When we followed up with some users, we heard so much excitement about easy-to-use tools, diverse game templates, and expanded gameplay options. It's so rewarding to see the creative ideas people come up with, and how they push the limits of what can be done in BuzzGames.
The team is also pleased with the foundation that has been laid for future workflows, keeping the user at the center of our focus and ensuring all functional teams stay fully involved throughout the process.