The zone.com Casual Games Challenge
My role: Group Manager, Product Design
MSN Casual Games needed to support historically conflicting business models (fixed-size pay-per-click advertising displays, monthly subscriptions, one-time download purchases) from a single online portal, and there was no formal methodology in place to help prioritize page layout or UX in support of those businesses. In addition, the site was not meeting goals for customer retention or satisfaction and the per-session time had been decreasing.
My team first conducted a review of revenue and business priorities, and I worked throughout the organization to first rank the importance of revenue streams and then develop a unified customer experience plan based on those priorities:
After reaching consensus on the customer experience, I worked closely with our User Research team and created a plan to address design, layout and navigation to both improve customer satisfaction and ensure that our business priorities were integrated smartly into how people used the site. The full redesign added a compelling set of sticky personalization features encouraging players to return to the site again and again to track game progress over time through a persistent achievement record.
Design pillars:
When we launched our first major redesign in 2003 with the new visual language we were almost immediately used as a case study for Design teams throughout the company -- many of our design pillars were adopted by MSN and other major teams within Microsoft.
Not only did we change the visual language of the site through color and white space, but I also created a set of interaction pillars mandating that screens stay limited to a maximum of three top-level calls to action at any given time, and that all calls were directly related to user action. This made the most notable difference in our multiplayer game client, which previously had both a number of critical code defects and suffered the same I can't understand what I'm supposed to be doing experience as the main site. The updated version was clean, technically robust, held to branding colors and iconography and tripled user comprehension.
Although the site has changed considerably over the 7 years since I led this design effort, it's notable that the multiplayer game client is the same version today that I shipped years ago.
My Role
I led the cross-discipline creative teams (Design, Art, UX, Program Management, Editorial) through the above site revisions and authored the Badges and personalization features.
The Results
With a greatly decluttered home page that focused on contextually relevant ads supporting the zone.com business models, and a completely rewritten navigation model and game player interface, traffic began increasing on the site by >5% month-over-month for the first year of release, reversing a trend of declining traffic for the previous several years.
The Badges program also increased per-session time by 30% immediately upon release – an amount that remained constant moving forward. In addition, the user half-life on the site doubled in the first year (as measured by Passport sign-ins at least once every 30 days in a 12-month period). Download sales increased by 15% after the first site redesign and advertising revenue increased by another 20%, largely due to additional opportunities for ad placement and sponsorships smartly integrated into the redesign.