FarmVille: Tropic Escape 

Role:

Lead UI/UX Designer

Year:

2016-2017

Responsibilities:

Collaborated with PM and Game Design on designing new features to drive retention and player engagement. Designed social features that players loved. Mentored and managed a team of 3 other UI/UX designers. Managed the knowledge transfer and handoff of all UI/UX from San Francisco to our counterpart team at Studio-I in Bangalore.

One of my favorite parts about working on a live project is the ability to watch and learn, in real time, how your product is perceived or performing. I love disguising myself as a "normal player", joining social clubs and interacting with our players. This gained super valuable insights and helped inform areas we should improve or fix.

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Beach Buddies

I designed the social experience in FarmVille: Tropic Escape from the ground up. With the feature dubbed internally as the "Social Center", players were able to connect with each other easier than ever before, gift items back and forth, learn more details about specific players, change their personal avatars and more.

Process

I created low fidelity prototypes, in this case using Adobe XD, in order to communicate the idea so I could get buy-in from other key stakeholders. Prototypes like these don't take much time to create and were proven invaluable in our design process. We were able to put a prototype like this in front of real players and have our UR team and conduct UX testing session to identify any areas that may be confusing or require further design thinking. This feature tested very well from the start and was generally understood. We addressed concerns we had directly in software.

Beach Clubs

In addition to Beach Buddies, I also designed the way groups of players could connect and join clubs. I wanted players to be able to quickly and easily find clubs that fit their playstyles, improve the chat experience, and give club leaders all of the tools could to make their club as unique as possible.

Process

I followed a similar approach as I did with Beach Buddies when creating this design for Beach Clubs. It all started with competitive analysis, interviews, and sketches. I then created functioning prototypes that I could test with users and get qualitative feedback, as well as stakeholder buy-in.

Buy Page Revamp

For this project, I partnered up heavily with our PM to create a best-in-class experience when buying resources. A big portion of this was the creation of a Specials Tab that cycled really valuable collections of items for a discounted price. Some of these would be timed and were uniquely tailored per player. As result, this feature saw a significant bump in revenue and continues to perform well to this day.