WORDS WITH FRIENDS 2
Zynga San Francisco
GROUP PLAY PROJECT
Words with friends has always been a game that brings family and friends together but has always been a 1 vs 1 experience.
“Moves” is the metric we use to measure the success of our game and the hypothesis was that by having a multiplayer experience our users can expand their social graph allowing them to play more users and create more moves.
The goal was to create a new multiplayer experience that allows our users to socialize and play with each other in a fun and engaging way.
FIND WHAT OUR USERS WANT
By collecting data from conducting several user testings sessions we had a rough idea of what our users wanted from a multiplayer experience and after testing internally several different wireframes and mockups we came with the first version of the group play experience, As a new game mode using most of the 1 vs 1 UX.
“The result of the user testing sessions was good but we knew that we could do better, realizing that the social element was missing. In the end we had a familiar Words with Friends experience but no real social interaction”
REPLICATING THE GAME BOARD EXPERIENCE
In order to integrate the social experience into the game we had to change how we saw the game and go back to its roots.
Words with friends was born from scrabble and scrabble is a board game. The next question was, how we can capture the essence of the board game experience without the players being in the same room?
IT’S LIKE BEING IN THE SAME ROOM
The integration of the chat and reactions into the game experience made the game feel more engaging, users were allowed to send messages or reactions to other players when they were playing, Also the ability to invite new players after the match started allowed the match to keep going even if a player leaves the game.
MY ROLE ON THE PROJECT
In this project I was the lead UX designer.
PROJECT CHALLENGES
The main challenge was internal because the game has been live for so many years any new experience or change finds some understandable resistance, which makes my job a bit more challenging, But with the right attitude, Mindset, And proper data backing up our decisions we could change some minds and move forward.
“IN THE END THIS FEATURE WAS DISCARDED BECAUSE OF THE VERY HIGH COST OF DEVELOPMENT, BUT IT SHOWED THE POTENTIAL THAT MULTIPLAYER WORDS WITH FRIENDS CAN ACHIEVE”