CityVille Mobile

Role:

Senior UX Designer

Year:

2015

Responsibilities:

● Collaborated with Game Design, PM, and other UX Designers to create & define key social features in the game.

● Managed external outsourcing team as well as our UI intern.

● Help establish style guide for the updated redesign of the UI.

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CityVille Franchises

CityVille Mobile was a remake of the popular CityVille game on Facebook. The original CityVille reached over 100 million players and one of the game's most popular features was called Franchises. Redesigning this highly popular feature was a no-brainer for the Mobile version. In addition to the obvious improvements that could be made from the original game, the redesign needed to be highly social to improve retention and provide deep content for the later levels of the game.

Common feedback from focus group testing informed us that our players desired customization above anything else. So, the initial priority was to deliver on that goal and execute it well. With this in mind, we set out to accomplish the following:

● Provide meaningful customization to the players by allowing them to create a unique business.

● Enable deep social mechanics involving the concepts of franchisees and customers.

● Create a way for players to compete with one another.

 Process

By doing quick ideation exercises, I was able to establish a general direction for how I wanted to present the Franchise creation flow to our players. I also created a first pass information architecture to better understand how everything fit together in this design, and where to go next. In early brainstorm sessions, I did competitive analysis on other games that did player customization well. I looked at areas where I could improve for our game, as well as take design elements that I believe were perfected. In our game, as the Franchise Creator's business became more successful, points earned could be reinvested into visual upgrades and stat boosts. Other players could tell at a glance how successful the business was.

It's crucial to build prototypes as early as possible, and preferrably on device, to be able to experience the feature as it's being designed. View the browser prototype here: https://xd.adobe.com/view/6bb850b5-4288-43f2-bbdf-8d02f50609b2/ 

 Final Comps