Champion Circuit
In my time at Big fish Casino and Jackpot Magic Slots, we ran 4-5 timed events a month to keep players engaged. One of these events was “Champion Circuit.” Players would pick a team and complete objectives to get rewards and points. The team with the most points at the end of the event would win and gain event rewards.
It was an event that was getting consistent confusion within customer feedback. We also wanted to tap into user needs around reward presentation that was sorely needed to incentivize players to enjoy the event.
Keeping users engaged in a close race!
What were the problems?
This project was presented by the product team with user problems defined prior to my involvement.
We didn’t show players what they were competing in the event for.
Players didn’t understand that the event was a competitive team based event.
The way the event defined the winning team at any given point wasn’t very clear. The event had an arrow at the top that pointed toward a color. That metaphor wasn’t succeeding to convey that status of the race.
Players didn’t know what their rewards were for the minor objectives that gave them points for the race but also a regular reward that would keep them motivated to play.
added explicit messaging that said this was a race event.
added some messaging below that defined a prize for the winning team.
added a place for the trophy the players are playing for.
1st problem and 2nd problems around grand prize clarity and the clarity that this was a competitive “race” were pretty efficiently dealt with in the initial screen the players reached where they chose a team.
Solutions
The next goal we wanted to tackle was trying to convey more clearly who was winning during the race at any given time. We also wanted to find a solution that would reinforce the competitive nature of the event. In the current design we had visuals of a pointer that would point toward the color of the team that was currently in the lead. Also, the animal character in the lead would change position.
One early design that resonated was to mirror the road and racing themes in a progress track that showed the positioning of each animal on the track to show the player their progress against each other in a closer metaphor to the race.
Our engineering team made a valuable piece of feedback that if one team is doing dramatically better than the other, the losing team might feel disheartened to compete.
Which led us to splitting the track into 3 day sections that would give the illusion that the race was always close. Each day would move the team markers up to a specific position in track and the positioning of the team markers would switch based on who was in the lead.
We also added some dynamic text at the top that would input the team the player is on in the text above to reinforce the competitive nature and reinforce a personal choice they made as valuable.
We also added the reward at the end of the progress bar to match how we present minor objective rewards in our other events.
When we initially finished this project, players could only complete 15 minor objectives before they had to wait for the end of the event to collect their reward. We added a state that let them know they need to come back and wait for the event to be over.
Design work was done on top of final art from a previous iteration of the event. Art team took these changes and built them with a completely new theme.
Mid-Fidelity Wireframes
