Player Profile Phone Connection Feature Design

The brief was to design a feature to encourage players to connect their cell phone number to their user profile. Helpdesk would use this number as a quicker way to contact users if they had issues with the game (login issues, for instance), and reward players who connected.

Technical constraints were that the cell phone confirmation feature was Phase 1 in an eventual full player profile roll out (which I was to design after), so the area in which the user’s cell number would be displayed in the app would, over time, expand out to include more fields of user data.

Another consideration was that most players were on tablet devices, so a flow where hopping between tablet devices and mobile devices had to be ironed out.

A project of this size required input from every team within the department. It was my job to communicate our intentions and ideas to each other and find out the technical limitations with the intentions with the feature.

Teams involved:

Design (apps), Design (marketing), Back End Dev, Game Control, iOS Front End Dev team, Acquisition, Help Desk, and QA.

I approached this project with seeking an understanding of the scale of what would be needed visually, and started with competitor analysis by looking for apps in the market that also had cell phone confirmation processes in place.

Post analysis, I created a number of wire frames to show the flow of the feature. It was iterated a number of times to ensure it was as simple and smooth as possible, cutting down the number of steps needed. Here, it was edited and refined with my lead and producer, and with input from the front end and back end Dev teams.

Visual Design was more straightforward from this point. The marketing lead designer was asked for input on how best to present in-game pop-ups and make them more appealing and non-threatening whilst still maintaining the brand’s look and feel. Design considerations for a full player profile were kept in mind as well when constructing the drop-down panel in the app's main task bar, as this section would have to expand to populate more fields later on.

Delivery and documentation were extensive. After final sign-off on the designs, I performed a simultaneous cut-up for deployment on iPad, iPhone, web, and Android. After this, I provided screenshots of every screen (which had font sizes shown, along with pixel measurements of elements to be drawn with code), a full visual flowchart of how it all connected, animatics for the few animated elements, documentation about localisation, and notes on expanding elements.

These were used by the developers to build the feature, QA to test how it should all look and work, and other teams to also understand the full feature (such as the help desk).

The new feature was A/B tested with a small cohort of users, with the expected uptake being that 1% of players would go through the process and complete it. The uptake was closer to 7% of users in the test, so the feature was rolled out to all 400k users, with a continued trend of uptake. With regular communications during the project, every team had input and visibility on the feature, which led to a smooth production pipeline.