Users were not engaging with the brand during commercial breaks
When watching sporting events on TV, sports fans also like to engage with brands like Paddypower, but when the commercials start, there is nothing to keep the fans engaged with the brand and excited. After hours of brainstorming, the idea of a trivia quiz game came to fruition.
I was asked to help create a trivia game to keep users engaged even during commercial breaks.
Give something, get something
The hypotheses for this product were that if we offered sports fans something fun and free to do during the commercial breaks from sports events, we would keep them engaged with our brand for longer, which could generate brand loyalty and potentially new users.
The more we keep sports fans using our brand, the less likely they are to switch to another one.
Trivia quizes during sports events are not something you see everyday
As I conducted my research, I quickly discovered that there was nothing of this sort anywhere at the time. There were plenty of sports-related quiz games, but as far as I was aware at the time, none of them did what we wanted theirs to do.
The mechanics of the games were that either the user would have to type in an answer to a question or pick from a multiple-choice list. None of the games that I researched or played had an interesting mechanic. They all followed the same boring paradigm.
Creating a novel yet intuitive experience
Not everyone likes trivia quiz games, so in order to set ourselves apart, I had to come up with a different mechanic that would provide users with enough novelty to look and feel fresh.
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Breaking the paradigm
We knew that we didn’t want to have the classic mechanism of quiz games, where you type in the answer to a question, or the multiple-choice paradigm in our game. We wanted users to give quick yes-or-no answers in an intuitive and simple way.ot everyone likes trivia quiz games, so in order to set ourselves apart, I had to come up with a different mechanic that would provide users with enough novelty to look and feel fresh.
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Finding the mechanic
In order to come up with an interesting mechanic for the trivia game, I had to look elsewhere for it. So I started looking at various games with engaging and intuitive mechanics and apps that had interesting ways of navigation and fully used touch gestures.
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Solutioning
Swiping left or right, popularised by dating apps, was the most common way to use gestures to select yes or no. This mechanic was fine, but I needed to add more functionality to it. The game was set up so that when a user creates an account, he will be given a certain amount of points, and he will select how many of those points he would allocate to an answer: User has 1000 points, 100 for each question, and while answering a specific question, he can choose a percentage for yes and no (80/20).
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Final result
I started to put pen to paper and came up with some designs, then I made some quick paper prototypes and did some ad hoc testing in the office. After the tests, I was confident enough to convert my paper prototypes to digital.
Apply branding meaningfully
This project did not benefit from an expansive timeline. It had very little resources and time allocated to it as it needed to be released in time for one of the biggest sports events of the year, which at that time was just a few months away. Lucky for me, the company had very strong brand books for all of its brands.
With this project, I took a "white label" approach where I defined the mechanism and all the flows, then applied specific branding and created UI elements, illustrations, and micro interactions to match the specific brand requirements.
Launch and wait
As this project did not benefit from a large time frame to get developed, at its release it had just basic functionality. The vision was to create a complex achievement system and expand the gameplay.