Paradise Bay

In 2015 I rejoined the mobile game industry with Z2 Live / King.com, on upcoming titles in their new midcore portfolio. Bringing my expertise in free-to-play player engagement and my previous work in the army-builder strategy genre, I was brought on to improve gameplay UX, develop social gameplay features, and advocate user-centered design within the studio.

My role

I led UX as a Senior User Experience Designer on Paradise Bay and Rise of Tyrants, two resource management titles in King's midcore portfolio. Alongside lead game designers and product managers, I facilitated UX on upcoming game features and delivered UX work (wireframes, prototypes and presentations) for upcoming features and business initiatives.

As the UX designer on Paradise Bay, a live top-150 casual resource management game with over 90,000 concurrent users, I helped reshape the product with the product team and advocated for user-centered design. The product manager (as Product Owner), the lead game designer and I formed the core product team, and drove a 40% increase in ARPU. We rallied the team to engage users with new monthly event-driven content, optimized engagement and monetization in "Trade Fests", ran radical product experiments, and delivered the best-performing ad incentives at King, with over 60% of the player base engaging in incentivized ads.

Improving user-centered design

I introduced Lean UX methods and advocated user-centered approaches in the team's agile pipelines. Partnering with game designers, data analysts and product managers, I advocated focusing user stories on outcomes in user behavior. By including a feature hypothesis and analytics expectations from our Business Performance Unit in the feature work, I helped give further insight into measuring product performance and what to improve. With the product team, I developed the agenda for, and took part in, the first Game Design Sprint (inspired by Google Design Sprints) as the team tackled its next set of large-scale problems.

Event-driven content and social experiences

I collaborated with stakeholders in product and design to implement new UX patterns that improved engagement and monetization in live events and social experiences. With Game Design, we planned new features for long-term scalability while extending the current feature set and testing new experiments aggressively across a wide audience. I applied player dynamics and psychology to promote social gameplay, adding social contracts and rewards through features like player gifting.

Trade Fest events: monthly, week-long events where players progress through tiers of collection objectives for limited-time content.

Sunshine Challenges are a daily challenge system that sets short-term goals per session and pushes players toward their next milestone.

Events and limited-time engagements are key drivers of Paradise Bay's long-term success.

Long-term player goals and player insights

I facilitated insights into long-term player goals with product teams, design leadership, the Business Performance Unit (analytics), marketing and player research. Developing Z2's first set of user personas and reviewing our first qualitative research, I helped refine long-term player goals with product managers and game designers. That delivered features such as Sunshine Challenges (daily objectives) and event management, and made me a key stakeholder in improving player onboarding.

Design artifacts

Social World Map prototype (Nov 2016). A video recording of a prototype demonstrating a World Map redesign with integrated social features.

Pet Shop UX (Sep 2016). Part of a new system that let players obtain new and unique pets by collecting stickers, and for the first time preview unique pets and what they had collected. Stickers came from completing complex content or buying sticker chests. The Pet Sticker system had a direct impact on player experience and increased monetization.

Adventuring Ship UX (Sep 2016). A mid-game feature giving players exclusive order challenges for a small premium price, unlocking Epic Pets available for a limited time. The work revised the feature's UX and interaction design, streamlining the user flow and improving the value proposition.

Battle abilities rework prototype (Apr 2016). A vision rework to improve the clarity and mechanics of the battle experience, and reveal the new abilities being implemented.

Guilds: guild events (Apr 2016). Proposals and visualizations for guild events and how they would manifest in game.

Guilds: chat layout (Apr 2016). A fast, low-fi rework of how the chat experience should look and feel, after several rounds of feedback and iteration.

Guilds: feature overview (Apr 2016). An overview of the screens and experiences derived from the initial proposal and design proposal.

Guilds: donations (Apr 2016). How players would donate units to one another.

Pet Stickerbook (Apr 2016). Explorations of ways to render a Pet Sticker inventory. Proposals were cross-referenced against an impact-versus-effort matrix to guide the feature team's next steps.

Player messaging channels (Apr 2016). A gradual feature set to grow our player messaging channels ahead of global launch.