Internship at Coke

UX summer internship 2020

How I Improved the experience of discovering and joining a game with friends on Roblox with an 8 - 10 hours limit.

Timeline

2021/6/10 - 6/12
(10hrs)

Type

Solo project

Goal

Improve the experience of discovering and joining a game with friends on Roblox with a 8 - 10 hours limit.

Overview

During summer 2020, I had the wonderful experience of joining the Coca-Cola company as a User Experience intern of the NextGen Connected experience platform, the digital experience carrier of the Coca-Cola company. I was primarily working on Creating the design library for better reusability of the NextGen Components.

It was a challenging and adventurous experience that allowed me to dive deep into this complex platform, trying to make the complicated simple by bringing a lot of creativity into my work.

Work Involved

Design Challenge Prompt

Roblox is seeing a lower-than-expected week 1 retention rate on their mobile app. In research interviews with users who have dropped off, many reported enjoying Roblox but that it was too difficult and time-consuming to find and join a game they want to play. Research also shows that users are more likely to enjoy the game when they are playing with their friends.

Please Evaluate the current discovery and game-joining experience, identify the pain points and propose how you would like to improve the experience, and deliver wireframe and interaction flows or a lo-fi prototype of your revised experience.

Sneak peak of the deliverable

My Design Process

01. Research

Secondary research - who plays the game and why?

Roblox is dominated by young users. 67% of users are under the age of 16. Only 14% of Roblox's users are over 25 years old. According to Roblox Investor Day presentation, 54.86% of Roblox’s daily active users were under 13 years old as of 2020. Most of the users are 9-12 years old.

The main reason people love the game including:

The capacity to create world like Sandbox
Great to play with friends
Never Get Bored! - constantly featuring new games

User Testing

To understand the discovery and joining experience flow, I conducted three usability tests. Ideally, it could be better to test with younger and experienced users, but due to the time allowed, I was only able to find some of my friends, who were first-time users of Roblox and in their age of mid-20s. I discovered following painpoints:

--Discover a New Game--

--Play with Friends --

User Personas

I created two personas based on the results from the user testing and the secondary analysis. I am targeting users older than 13 years old at this round of design.

Target Users - why i choose 13+?

I am targeting users older than 13 years old at this round of design because:

Company Strategy- In March 2020, The company mentioned during its investment meeting that its strategy is to focus on catering to older users.
Feedback from the secondary research - During my own research on r/Roblox and forum, I saw multiple Roblox users mentioned they started playing Roblox as a child, but they are now growing up and find it's harder to discover new games since most of the developers are developing games for younger kids(This could be biased due to the fact Reddit is predominantly used by young adults)
Time limitation - Due to the time allowed, I was only able to reach out to a few of my friends in their 20s to conduct usability tests

User Flows

Based on the User testings and perform tasks by myself, I created following workflows in both discover a new game and play with friends.

-Discover a New Game old flow & Proposed flow-

-Play with Friends old flow & Proposed flow-

02. Design

Ideation

How might we help users optimize their search experience?

How might we support users join games with their friends more intuitively?

Sketches and Wireframes

After sketched out the overall layout of the design, I created the following wireframes:

--View detailed design decisions--

User Testings

I Created the usability test on Maze then send it through the Discord Roblox channel. I got overall 5 responses from respondents age 9 to 25 years old.

Below are my key Findings:

In the discover experience, most of the users tried to use the search bar/the recommend 13+ filter to reach the content (Part of the reason was the task name I designed was misleading - Discover a 13+ adventure game call Candy crush)
In the play with friend interaction, 5/5 users successfully completed the task within 15 seconds.

Feedback From users

“i liked your idea for this. the discover page right now is based more off of ratings/prices and there is only one recommended section with all of the recommended games (regardless of tags) clumped together.”
----Roblox User 13-16 years old

“ it was fun i had no issues with doing the missions i rate it 9/10”
----Roblox User 13-16 years old

High Fidelity mockups

I created the High Fidelity mockups based on the user's feedback during the user testings.

During the follow-up conversation with 2 of the testing respondents, both of them mentioned they use the join server feature a lot because Roblox tends to add users into the server their friends are playing in. But sometimes, they want to play alone/find a faster server. Therefore, I added a Server section on the game description page to help them join the server they want more intuitively.

--Clickable prototype--

Takeaways

Paying more attention to the instructions when doing survey-like user testings.

Discovering new game interaction resulted in a high bounce rate & indirect success in 60% because the task name & instruction I designed was misleading. Because designers won't get the chance to assist the respondents during testings, paying more attention to the instruction is very crucial in getting a more accurate test result.

Recruiting teenage users isn't that hard. It just needs to improvise more when doing it.

It was a fun experience of "undercover" in the Roblox discord group, recruiting users to participate in the usability test. Since spam is a very common issue in the Roblox community, most users refuse to participate/ignore my message in the thread. I spent some time explaining, also show my Linkedin profile to them during the private chat to authenticate my identity. I got 5 responses on that day and had the chance to chat with 2 of the respondents.