Designing for Engagement: Effects of Social Features in Mobile Manager Games

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U^MEÅ U^NIVERSITY

MASTER THESIS, 30 ECTS

Designing for Engagement: Effects of Social Features in Mobile Manager Games

Author:

Viktor Åhlund

Supervisor:

Ole Norberg

A thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MSc. Interaction Technology & Design

in the

Faculty of Engineering and Science Department of Applied Physics and Electronics

November 26, 2020

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Abstract

Mobile gaming was in 2019 the biggest revenue-creating area of gaming, beating all other forms of gaming combined. Despite this, mobile manager games are still a fairly unexplored genre. The thesis explores the area of social features in these kinds of games. Studies around the success of social networks, engaging features in mobile apps and good UX practices in mobile games were made. These findings together with a questionnaire with 87 participants created a framework of how a social feature should look like when implementing into a manager game. The feature, Social League, was designed and implemented in the game World Football Man- ager created by Gold Town Games. The feature is available from Friday’s through Sunday’s.

Data was collected from World Football Manager prior to the implementation of Social League to get measurable data. The most central data was average game time of the players. Six weeks after Social League got implemented, the thesis studied the app and the updated data. The result showed a moderate increase of player session during the whole week, 7.3%. While looking exclusively on weekends, the average session increased by 15%, a major increase. This suggests that an introduced social aspect should increase the engagement of users in a mobile manager game.

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Acknowledgements

I want to thank my project advisor, Ole Norberg, for his great supervision during the thesis. His valuable feedback kept the thesis work going and helped me improve the quality of the paper. Second, I would like to give my appreciation to Pär Hultgren and the employees at Gold Town Games for allowing me to work from their office.

Their office environment gave me motivation to finish the thesis. Further, I would like to thank my peer review group, Erik Frängsmyr & Isak Gustafsson, for very interesting and fun discussions during the semester. Lastly, a big thanks to my family for their invaluable support.

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List of Abbreviations

WHM World Hockey Manager WFM World Football Manager

Meme Image or animated GIF, mostly used in a comedic sense.

SL Social League UX User Experience

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1

Chapter 1

Introduction

Mobile gaming had, in 2019, a 25% higher revenue than all other forms of gaming combined [1]. The number of games on mobile stores is increasing each day and every game has its type of interaction. Generally, while other types of apps have a pretty clear interaction pattern, mobile games require a high amount of interaction which presents challenges for the designer [2]. Different types of games can have very different purposes and controls, meaning that the designer has to take the game’s usability close into account when designing the interaction. Furthermore, it has become increasingly popular to implement social features in games where players can invite friends to play and/or communicate with each other. This creates even bigger depth in the app which has to be solved in a presentable way.

A social feature enables the user to play with friends which creates value for both players, preferably some in-game currency or social value [3]. As there is little research about the effects of social features in mobile games, as mentioned further down in the literature study, this thesis aims to try and gather information about player behavior and investigate the difference of a game that implements a social feature. This will partly be done by looking at the worldwide success of social networks and see if it is possible to take some factors from there and put into a social feature. The goal is to try and see if there is a noticeable difference in the amount of playtime on the app after the feature is implemented. This will be done by working on two games, World Hockey Manager and World Football Manager, created by the company Gold Town Games.

This work will be made through a theoretical framework that will act as a backbone to help make the decisions of design and features while maintaining GTG’s vision of what the feature should be. Lastly, user feedback will be very important to measure if the desired result is reached.

1.1 Gold Town Games AB

This thesis work was created in cooperation with Gold Town Games AB, a mobile game developing studio located in Skellefteå, Sweden. Their focus is on mobile manager games, specifically football and hockey which are described below. GTG has a feature in the game World Hockey Manager called Social League that enables players to play together to earn points towards rewards. This feature is scheduled for a big rework which is where this cooperation comes in. The task is to make the Social League more central in the app and try to increase the overall enjoyment of the game from this. The updated feature will be implemented in World Football Manager where a social feature was absent, and from there measure the results.

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2 Chapter 1. Introduction

(a) World Hockey Manager (b) World Football Manager FIGURE1.1: World Hockey Manager & World Football Manager

1.2 Mobile Manager Games

A manager game is a form of simulation game where the user is supposed to develop some sort of structure. In sports, this is usually a club including team, academy, and arena. Manager games are said to have some educational value, making it widely accepted as a ’good game’ compared to, for example, shooting games [4]. One aspect of why these might be addressed as educational is the economical aspect of the genre, where the user is forced to handle their economy to be able to progress further in the game.

1.2.1 World Hockey Manager

World Hockey Manager (WHM) is a management game that gives the user a manager role of a hockey team. The player is advised to play cups, train the players and evolve the teams’ arena and facilities. WHM is the only game that has Social League implemented as of the beginning of the thesis work. This feature is the one that will get reworked during the thesis from several design guidelines, both from academic research, user feedback, and Gold Town Games work process. As WHM already has a social feature, there are some data and key tasks that can be accessed in able to get some understanding of what is successful at the moment. Fig. 1.1 (a) shows an image of WHM.

1.2.2 World Football Manager

World Football Manager (WFM) is the equivalent of WHM but for people interested in football. Some minor changes are done in the gameplay but overall it is very sim- ilar to WHM. The interaction of the app almost mirrors WHM. The biggest change from WHM is that WFM doesn’t have a social feature, Social League. This creates a good opportunity to measure the effects of a reworked Social League and implemented social features in the app as it creates a completely new game mode for the

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1.3. Objective 3

user. This will imply that it is possible to measure the data from previous months and see if one can see a considerable change after the new Social League is implemented. WFM was recent, in may 2020 released in Europe after having playability in North America and Scandinavia, giving the possibility of having a larger target group. An image of WFM can be found in Fig. 1.1 (b).

1.3 Objective

The goal of this thesis is to define and evaluate important factors that increase engagement within mobile games and apply those to a social feature that is central in the app and measure the results. Can a social feature increase the overall enjoyment and playtime per day of a mobile manager game?

1.3.1 Research Questions

To fulfill the objective of the thesis, the following research questions has to be an- swered:

• How are users playing Social League today?

• What is making the users continuing playing Social League?

• Extract important factors for success in social features. What are some of these?

• Is it possible to increase the time spent on gaming using social features?

1.4 Limitations

The 25-week duration of the thesis will limit the number of details that will get implemented from the design. Some design choices will not be implemented but it should not have any major interference with measurement of the result later on. This is further discussed in the Discussion section. The remaining design will probably get implemented at a later time.

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Chapter 2

Theory

2.1 Social Networks

Social networks are some of the most impacting websites on the internet right now.

The amount of information that is being sent through the companies servers are massive. It was estimated that social networks will reach 2.95 billion users in 2022 [5]. However, as of January 2020, this number was already at 3.8 billion, surpassing the prediction by quite a margin [6].

The formal definition of a social network is a group of people such as friends, cowork- ers, or acquaintances being connected through interpersonal relations [7]. An SNA (Social Network Application) does this through an online site or service to make these people maintain their relationship. While these websites or services have gotten a lot of critique due to lack of personal privacy, the services continue to have a lot of success [8]. Despite the user concern, it is still a great way to get people to connect.

2.1.1 User engagement in social networks

In recent years, the amount of engagement in social networks has gotten quite a lot of interest [9]. Numerous articles are researching the area of user engagement. Articles about finding critical users, recommending groups, measuring user engagement, and rewarding engagement are a few articles that bring up strategies for increasing user engagement [9, 10, 11, 12]. This is a big factor in why social networks became so popular, introducing ways in which users more frequently engage with each other [9]. Since SNAs are highly dependent on the users connecting on the platform, high engagement is wanted to get these groups to stay [11].

2.1.2 The success of social networks

While social network applications are widely popular, each application generally has a unique niche that creates the success factors of that specific service. Twitter has its short messaging, Facebook has its widely general usage and LinkedIn focuses on businesses [13]. This being the case, it should be possible to look at each service and look at the success factors to see if one might be able to introduce some into its service. In this case, Twitter should have sufficient context to get a good idea of what creates the huge success that the application is today. From a user’s perspective, it is mentioned that some factors are an open culture, short messaging, playfulness, and effort expectancy [13].

It is mentioned in an article that their perception of a successful social network is to

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2.2. Social League 5

be able to shape it to each group’s purpose. For example, set up community guidelines, create norms for the group, and limit the involvement of admins to increase the engagement between users [14].

2.2 Social League

Social League is a feature implemented in WHM which purpose is to create a social group that plays towards a unified goal. The goal of the game mode is to earn points together by winning as many games as possible on a specific time, Friday through Sunday. If the group gets enough points, a reward will be warranted to each player.

More specifically, the group collects points towards a pack that gets upgraded the more points the group gets. Lastly, the five players that gathered the most points earn more rewards than the rest of the group.

The group can chat with each other and in the future, being able to follow the development of each player and trade between each other.

The feature is scheduled to be implemented in WFM in the short future. The plan is to be able to develop it during this research paper and look at the effects it has had on the app. This is the central part of this thesis work as Social League is the social feature that is to be investigated and developed during the time.

2.3 Playing with friends

As users are a very central part of a social feature or social network, friends is a fitting way of starting a social feature. While not being necessary, having a list of friends playing the game is a practical way of increasing user engagement. A close group of friends playing the same game increases the chance of them continuously playing [11, 3]. It would be possible to create a social feature disregarding friends as the term ’social feature’ only requires users to play with other users, it might be a good segway into creating further user engagement.

2.3.1 Inviting friends

Letting users invite friends to play is a great way to earn a good word-of-mouth marketing which hopefully increases the user count. However, it might be perceived as annoying to receive game invites from friends. A study has shown that users are more receptive to invite friends if they receive some sort of reward for doing so.

The study also mentions that this is regardless of genre, the popularity of preference and that users comfortably invites 20 friends without feeling like they are causing discomfort for their friends [3].

To tackle the problem with annoying invites, the same study presents that a user is more receptive to sign up for the game if they receive four invites during a short time. The study suggests that one might put recently invited people at the top of the friend list as long as they have fewer than four invites recently [3].

2.4 Chat feature

While inviting friends is a good way to increase the connectivity between users, there is no way to communicate with each other. In this case, a chat feature is a

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6 Chapter 2. Theory

great way to increase engagement and getting the players to feel connected using the game.

2.5 Engagement in Chat Features

It is hard to set up a framework of how to make an engaging chat window since almost all content is created by the user, so the developer has very little control of how engaging the chat will be. But, it might be possible to look at other aspects and try to find something that is engaging and, if possible, implement it in the app.

In an article about addiction in mobile games, the author mentioned that their test group thought graphics and animations were part of what makes a game addictive [15]. It might be possible to take these findings into a chat feature and hopefully get the same result. Addiction and engagement are close together and creating animations in a chat should be possible to make. As will be introduced below, GIFs are a good way of creating interest in a chat, and since these are animations this is further proving the point of the effects of introducing GIFs to the user. Further investigating addiction and engagement, these have a very different tone, but in mobile applications, they are very close together. While addiction generally relates to a negative relationship with the thing the person is addicted to, mobile apps generally refer to addiction to high engagement with the app [16].

As mentioned above, graphics were also a big part of creating addiction towards a game. What is possible to take out from this is to have the chat feature as close to the graphical guidelines for the rest of the app as possible. It is also important to make the text stand out and not be hard to read in the chat window. This makes interaction as seamless as possible. [17]. An example of a good and bad way of showing the text to the user is shown below:

FIGURE2.1: Example of a mismatched chat bubble

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2.6. GIFs 7

FIGURE2.2: Example of a more user friendly chat

Fig. 2.1 and Fig. 2.2 might be seen as an extreme visualization, but it proves the point of how a designer can create a visually compelling element in which the user itself creates the content. Having trouble reading something another user wrote will make the reader have a more negative attitude towards the chat [17].

Despite all this, it is mainly the different users interacting with each other in the chat that is creating value of engagement to each other. It might be possible to create some additional features besides chatting to further increase the engagement within this feature. The designer’s job is to present the content in the best way possible, the rest is up to the users.

2.6 GIFs

A GIF, short for Graphics Interchange Format, originated in 1987 as a fast and cheap way to present moving images on websites [18]. While it fell out of context during the ’90s, it has had a major resurgence during the 2010s, mainly as the global phe- nomenon called ’memes’ [19]. A GIF is nowadays mostly used to communicate with friends. A study of a GIFs engagement on the blog platform Tumblr showed that GIFs were the most engaging form of media on the platform [18].

2.6.1 GIFs in Social Contexts

While being mostly used in situations where communication partners are friends, they are also an effective tool for communication when not knowing each other.

While being effective, the latter more often results in miscommunication between the partners [20]. This because different groups of friends, cultures, and situations have different interpretations of certain GIFs. Also, a GIF helps present body gestures that can only be presented in face-to-face communication [21]. This implies that it is easier to understand a GIF if it is sent by someone you know in real life.

A study of the cultural significance of GIFs mentioned that GIFs shape the overall culture of the app. For example, Twitter has a fast communication practice that suits GIFs very well [20]. So, depending on what the app wants to reflect, implementing GIFs might be either positive or negative. It is socially accepted that a GIF is far more comedic than, for example, a row of text is [22].

2.6.2 GIFs in Conversations

GIFs are widely used as a media to express actions or emotions [20]. Instead of using text, GIFs are used to enhance the effect of the conversation. For example, instead of

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8 Chapter 2. Theory

writing "I’m so excited, can’t wait!" one might search for the word "Excited" in the GIF library and send the most appealing one. A person in an article from the New York Times mentions that

“I’m able to express these really complex emotions in the span of two seconds”

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This perfectly encapsulates the effects GIFs have on a conversation. It takes something that might be abundant and hard to express into something humorous, short, and interesting.

2.7 Retention

Retention is an expression used to describe how many users return to the app. It is a common way to target where the app does something wrong, resulting in players moving from the app. For example, an app might have an 80% retention day 1, suggesting that their start-up and on-boarding is fairly efficient. Continuing, retention day 14 might go down to 20%. What this means is that on day 1, 80% of people downloading the app comes back at least the first day. Retention day 14 suggests that from the 80%, only 20% returns on day 14. More analytically, this suggests that something goes wrong in the app during these days [24].

Using retention and a good overview of what a user does in the app creates a framework to look at the app and find weak interactions/gameplay where one might delete the application.

The same article mentions that an app’s retention rate is usually fairly low. One should not be surprised if retention day 1 is about 30%, especially if the app has a low number of players. This might change to around 60% if the app has a high user amount. They mention that for all apps, day 1 retention is around 36% and falls below 30% day 7 [24]. A rule of thumb according to Peltonen et al. is that retention falls most in the first few days and planes out later on.

According to Gold Town Games, the industry standard is around 40% Day 1, 20%

Day 7, and 10% Day 30.

2.8 UX in Mobile Games

Bad design in a mobile application can be extremely frustrating and quickly put an end to the app on the users’ phone. When one talks about UX in mobile games it is reasonable to bring forward the term ’life cycle’. The life cycle reflects the amount of time the application is running before turning it off. A big factor to a lacking life cycle in a mobile game is a low level of UX [25]. It is therefore crucial, but difficult, to achieve a good UX to keep users playing the game. Some of the difficulties when ap- proaching this problem is brand-specific appearance, an applications’ friendliness, different hardware specifications, and event categories [25].

When talking about good UX, some key points are generally discussed [17]. These are:

• Visibility. A user should know, just by looking at the app, what the purpose is. There shouldn’t be any confusion about the action the user can take.

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2.9. Visual Cues 9

• Mapping. Mapping is a term that describes the correlation between the el- ements of two sets of things. In a good design, this means that the control of some elements will very closely resemble the effect of said element. A com- monly used example is the vertical scrollbar on webpages. The visual indicator tells you where you are on the site, and the page scrolls with the same speed and sensitivity as the indicator.

• Feedback. A user has to receive feedback after every action to let them know if their action was successful or not.

• Constraints. Constraints are used to restrict the user from unwanted interac- tion in a design. It does not mean keeping information from the user, but re- stricting choices so the user does not perform unwanted actions. For example, a form where the user writer their first- and surname shouldn’t allow numbers in it.

• Consistency. Patterns in the design are crucial to make the user understand the app throughout the interaction process. If the same action triggers different outputs, something is wrong with the design. The user should quickly learn what a specific action does and should be able to trust that said action performs the same every time.

• Affordance. The term affordance is used to indicate the link between how a thing looks visually and how it is used. A design is said to have good affordance is it’s apparent how it is supposed to be used just by looking at it.

.

Furthermore, Koivisto et al. implemented some heuristics that were added into the thesis work that fitted well with the task [26].

• H1. Don’t waste the players’ time.

• H11. Don’t encourage repetitive and boring tasks.

• GU4. Indicators are visible.

• GP10. The game support different playing styles.

2.9 Visual Cues

A visual cue is an element that gets the user’s attention. This might be a visual cue, an audio cue, or other sorts of ways to get the attention of the user. This is a great way to lead the players towards something the developer wants them to notice [27].

For this thesis, since Social League is not available for the player in the beginning, it should be a successful way to get the player aware of the Social League when it is available.

This might also be a sufficient way to use it in other places in the app. For example, visual cues are very proficient in getting players out of areas in the app where they might get stuck [28]. Getting stuck is a major factor in creating frustration in players, and visual cues can appear after detecting that the player might be stuck somewhere. This might be presented by a flashing button, bouncing arrow, etc.

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10 Chapter 2. Theory

2.10 Think-Aloud Method

When testing an app or interface, it might be hard to get the tester’s feelings towards it. A popular and proven technique to tackle this problem is the "think aloud"

method [29]. What this does is encourage the tester to say what he/she is thinking out loud while trying the app. This usually brings out the honest opinions and raw thought process during the session [29].

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Chapter 3

Method

This chapter explains the methodology during the thesis work. A quick visual representation of this can be found in Fig. 3.1.

FIGURE3.1: Visual Representation of the Methodology.

3.1 Literature Study

A literature study was made at the beginning of the thesis to get knowledge about what makes a manager game successful and engaging. This question had barely any information in scientific articles, suggesting that the area of mobile manager games is still a rather unexplored genre of gaming. Since there was difficult to get information about engagement in mobile manager games, the study shifted into getting information about what makes chat features engaging, social networks impact, as well as looking into designing for mobile devices. This shifted the goal into understanding some areas which create engagement within an app.

The first part of the study focused on looking at chat features and what makes them engaging. More specifically, GIFs’ effects on conversations were thoroughly studied to understand how they perform in an online chat. Furthermore, the study continued exploring what creates the overall enjoyment of chatting with people online.

The study continued to examine the areas regarding design. How can one achieve making a feature stand out of an app, making it central to the user? Since it is a rather large area, the study focused on engaging UX and visual cues to create curiosity.

The last part of the study was to read two different reports Gold Town Games ordered from different parties where WHM was examined. The reports focused on retention and the overall experience of playing the game.

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12 Chapter 3. Method

The result of the study was used to understand what features needed to be implemented into Social League to make it more engaging as well as getting some design guidelines to make people realize SL is a central part of the app.

In 2017, Gold Town Games ordered a review of WHM from a third party company, remaining unnamed. The review aimed to point out the strengths and weaknesses the app had. The 32 paged document included areas such as retention, onboarding, design, choice of icons, and UX. Most of the document had its sight on the overall app, but some aspects were possible to narrow down into Social League.

In summary, the literature study examined the following areas:

• Chat features in general as well as GIFs

• The success of social networks

• UX in mobile games

• Third party review of World Hockey Manager

3.2 User Feedback on Existing Platform

To get an understanding of how players perceive the current feature of Social League, an extensive form was sent out to WHMs’ main forum. The form took around 15-30 minutes to fill in and was made for the users to express their enjoyment towards Social League overall. The form was open from Friday 24/4 through 27/4 2020 and collected a total of 87 submissions.

As mentioned above, the biggest factor for the form was to get data about the players’ behavior and overall perception of the feature during weekends. While creating the form, three key questions were brought forward. These were

• Why do the users’ return each weekend and continue playing?

• What key factors might be behind people quitting the app?

• In what way are users using the chat feature as of now?

By having these three questions as the base of the questionnaire, it was possible to construct the questions to get an understanding of what makes SL engaging at the moment, what critical flaws the feature have which results in players not returning, and lastly, what is their current feeling of the main social feature at the moment. The last question was brought in because the chat window is the main way for people to communicate, resulting in it being the most social feature and possibly, the one where players feel the most freedom. Naturally, this is an area of the app which one might want to improve to get further engagement.

The questions in the form were made as open as possible to get the participant to express their thoughts on the game. The form started with closed questions to get some overall data about playing behavior. Further down, more open questions occurred. Significant work was also made to keep the questions unbiased so the user can make their own opinion. This is to remove the possibility of tilting the user towards the answer one might think or want. The entirety of the questionnaire can be found in Appendix C.

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3.3. Data 13

3.3 Data

To get a measurable result, statistics about Social League and the game were gathered. The first investigation was on WHM and SL to get an estimated framework of how the statistics could look like. Further, data from before the implementation of Social League on WFM were added to have data to compare with. Lastly, statistics of the Social League in WFM and some information on the general app were gathered to get measurable results. Since SL did not exist on WFM it had to be collected from WHM which might produce some noise, but overall it should be pretty accu- rate across games, especially since the data from WHM only acted as a framework.

Retention is used to get an understanding of how many new people started playing the game during the period.

The average game time of WFM is the biggest factor when measuring results after the new SL is implemented. Since this is the most discrete and straight-forward measurement, it fits well into the frame of the thesis work. Lastly, the SL statistics are good for understanding if something is going wrong after the implementation.

All measurements were made through Firebase and looked at a specific time frame for each section.

3.4 Design Process

While evaluating and re-designing Social League, both gameplay and design, a close conversation with Gold Town Games’ interaction designer were held. With weekly meetings, it was possible to get a good knowledge of what the company’s vision of the app was as well as understand how the design process worked. The thesis work started with evaluating the current Social League to find ruptures in the flow and gameplay while also discussing what might be a good path to take to increase the engagement of the feature. Some aspects that both parties agreed on was that the chat needed more depth and clarity since the chat is a good way to increase the overall engagement with social features. Together with some factors behind the success of social networks such as to shape the feature to the group’s purpose, a new design could be made. Fig. 3.2 shows how the design process was issued. Re- search/Heuristics refers to section 2.8 in the Theory section. These were thoroughly examined during the design work.

FIGURE3.2: Workflow of Design Process.

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3.4.1 Pre-game cup

Further, some new game mechanics were discussed to increase the acknowledgment that the feature existed. Since Social League is active from Friday through Sunday, there are 5 days where the feature isn’t used at all. To change this, a new game mode was discussed. The task was to create an event on Wednesdays which could give some extra preparation in the upcoming weekend. The mode that was decided was a pre-weekend cup, where each league got placed in different groups based on the average star rating of each team. The league then played against other leagues in their group which in the end crowned a champion of the cup. The top leagues got different rewards depending on the placing which they could use in the upcoming weekend. The purpose of this game mode was to increase the attendance for Social League which would further increase the social aspect of the entire feature.

3.4.2 Dynamic icons

While discussing further development of new game modes, design work was also made. The purpose of this work was to increase the area where Social League was advertised inside the app. Naturally, the bottom navigation bar was pinpointed of being a good place to do some designing. A good way of increasing the user’s attention to a specific place on a page is with visual cues [27]. With that in mind, animations were introduced towards the Social League icon. A dynamic icon was created, where the icon changed part of its design depending on the newest updates.

The icon changed if a new message was received, a new trade offer appeared, or if a friend was online. Further, popups were added when the Social League was running during the weekend. This was specifically created to engage a possibly inactive player to start playing with the group again. The popups occurred when the user dropped/increased in the internal league.

3.4.3 Chat

While working with the chat feature, most of the time spent was focused on a way to increase the amount of time the user spends on this page. Since the thesis focuses on the social aspect, extra time was needed for the chat. One of the focus points were How can one implement more in-game features in the chat?. This would hopefully increase the time spent since it enables some sort of interaction besides writing a text line.

3.4.4 Overview

The Overview section of SL is the view that presents all the players in the group.

Since it does not need any more than that, there was not much focus on this page in the design process. The one change that was discussed was that it should be possible to invite friends into the group if it is not full.

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3.5. Testing on Interactive Prototype 15

3.4.5 Introducing new views

To make the feature more relevant to the app, some new functionality was introduced. This was both to make it a more social feature as well as trying to increase the quality-of-life for the players.

Stats

Something that was widely mentioned in the questionnaire was getting more statistics overall. The users seemed to feel like the game was lacking more interesting statistics throughout the app. This naturally led to looking at introducing statistics of each Social League. While still keeping it undecided which type of statistics should be tracked, a view of this was created.

Friends

The most central part of a social feature is of course the ability to have friends in the game. Since this didn’t exist in the previous version of the Social League, this had to be designed. While GTG had an idea of how this view should look like, there was some uncertainty of how it was supposed to work. While debating what should be in a Friend’s view, some ideas were presented. This was a friend list, search for friends, challenge friends, and pending friend invites. This created the very central part of making Social League more social for the players to experience. Without a thorough friend feature, most of the updates would become obsolete.

The design process was continuously worked on during the first 15 weeks of the thesis work.

3.5 Testing on Interactive Prototype

Though the current feature was tested on a user base, the interactive prototype was tested on the developers and employees of Gold Town Games. This decision was made together with GTG as both parties feel like an interactive prototype will not give the same depth in the answers as the survey on the current platform. Instead, the feature would be implemented to a point where it was functioning as the way it should and then look at how the users feel about the changes. The way the testing on an interactive prototype was presented was by giving each employee the prototype and let them navigate through the interface and see if they can understand what was going on and what new features are presented.

The prototype was created in Figma, a tool that enables the designer to create a clickable prototype through a set of images, in this case, the Social League. It is also possible to add some animations to try and mirror the feeling of the implemented design. This solution was tested on six employees, where four were developers, one designer, and one community manager. The testing did not have a clear interaction path, but rather let each individual navigate through the app, using the think-aloud strategy and asking questions whenever they had one. All testers were in their 20s and 30s. Since these employees know the games the best, and that the survey showed that the participants were very motivated to play the game, this sort of testing should not cause a big disturbance in the design.

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3.6 Implementation

The implementation of the new feature was made by the development team at GTG.

While doing the design process, meetings with the development team were made to ensure that all changes were possible to be implemented. When the design was finished, a thorough walkthrough of the interaction flow and data handling was held to further ensure that the design had sufficient information to later develop. Since there was a scheduled launch and the update had a lot of small and bigger features, a decision had to be made of what should be implemented in the first version and what had to wait for another release.

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Chapter 4

Results

4.1 User Feedback on Existing Platform

There were various quality of the submissions, but overall it was possible to collect, analyze, and group all of the answers. Around 3-4 submissions were vaguely an- swered and it was not possible to extract any information. Below, every question, referencing Appendix C, is divided and the statistical result is presented for each of the questions.

1. With the question of how many games each user plays during the weekend, there was a variety of different answers, ranging from 0 to 220 games. The mean value of the participants were 114 games during Social League. The medianwas noticeably lower, landing on 60 games.

2. Fig. 4.1 shows that 85% of the participants stated that they play more games during the weekend, the period where Social League is active.

FIGURE4.1: Quantity of people playing more on weekends

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18 Chapter 4. Results

3. Fig. 4.2 states that 93.5% of the users that said ’yes’ in the previous question said that this is in fact due to Social League being active.

FIGURE4.2: Diagram showing how many people are playing more because of SL

4. Fig 4.3 below shows the perception of enjoyment by the users when playing the app during weekends.

FIGURE4.3: Enjoyment of World Hockey Manager during weekends

5. 67.5% mentioned that they didn’t have any other reason to play Social League apart from the rewards gathered at the end of the weekend. Most of the answers stated that it was mandatory to get good rewards during Social League to be able to play at their normal pace during the weekdays.

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4.1. User Feedback on Existing Platform 19

6. Figure 4.4 shows the percentage of players that has one or more friends playing in their group.

FIGURE4.4: Percentage of players that have friends in their group

7. When asked if the user takes part in the chat feature in Social League, Fig. 4.5 shows that 42% said ’Yes’, 37% said ’Barely’ and 21% said ’No’.

FIGURE4.5: Number of people using the chat in Social League.

8. Out of the 41.8% that used the chat feature, most of the users stated that the conversations were mostly about group performance and how much they ex- pect everybody to play during the weekend. A small group said they used the chat feature to set up rules for the entire group. For example, how many coins each individual needs to collect to be able to stay in the group. The last few stated that they talked about various topics outside of the game and that the chat was usually ’pretty dead’.

9. When asked how determined the player is to rank high/get the highest reward during the weekend, only five stated they were not determined at all. The rest of the participants were very determined to place at high rankings. Not necessarily at the top of the leader board, but at least at a position where they get good rewards.

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10. Everyone except 15 stated that the main reason they come back each weekend playing Social League was rewards/coins/cards. Out of the 15 that stated oth- erwise, most answers were either ’The social part’, ’don’t know’, ’addicting’, or

’enjoyment’. One interesting answer from this question was ’If we didn’t have good communication within our group I would have stopped playing months ago’.

11. From Fig. 4.6, the enjoyment of the feature Social League is fairly high. The majority of the players ranked this as a 7 or 8.

FIGURE 4.6: Graph of people’s enjoyment while playing Social League (1 = none - 10 = a lot)

12. When asked how much they feel part of a community, there was a wide variety of answers. The biggest cluster was at an 8, while also ranging down to 4 with a few players stating it as a 10 or 1. Staple diagram can be found in Fig. 4.7.

13. When asked about perceived critical flaws in the current feature of Social League, the majority of the answers were about improvements in the chat. The topics ranged from ’fixing crashes’, ’enabling emojis’ and ’further development with the chat’. Other answers were mainly about getting more statistics into the game as well as enabling better rewards for the top groups.

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4.2. Data 21

FIGURE4.7: Graph of users perception of a Social League community (1 = none - 10 = a lot)

4.2 Data

4.2.1 Data prior to updated Social League, World Hockey Manager

By looking at the collected data from GTG, it was possible to gather some informa- tion about game time from users. During the period of 20th of April - 20th of May 2020, the average daily session lasted 30 minutes and 5 seconds. The retention of new users was 31% for day 1, 18% day 3, 14% day 7, 12% day 14 and 10% day 21.

When measuring Social League data it was only possible to look at the latest weekend as the data only saved for five days. Analytics were divided into days between May 15th through May 17th.

• May 15th. On this day, 13990 users played the game, where 7365 specifically played Social League. 53%.

• May 16th. Saturday the 16th, 13815 users played, 10004 of them in Social League. 72%.

• May 17th. On the last day of Social League, 10292 played the game mode out of 14070 daily users. 73%.

Out of the users that played SL on the 15th, 42% (4163) of them came back and played on the 16th. Out of the players that played SL on the 16th, 50% (5184) came back on Sunday the 17th and played the game mode.

Lastly, 12083 individual users played SL the weekend of 15-17th of May, where 30%

(3571) of them played all three days.

4.2.2 Data from World Football Manager

Social League was implemented into WFM on July 16th 2020.

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Prior to Social League

When looking at WFM prior to SL, the thesis examined 1-15th of July 2020. The av- erage game time during this period was 16 minutes and 28 seconds. The retention rates during this period were 24% D1, 11% D3, 4% D14, and 3% D21.

It was also possible to look at specific weekends during these periods. The data points here were also average session.

• June 12th - June 14th: 15 minutes & 42 seconds

• June 19th - June 21th: 16 minutes & 4 seconds

• July 3rd - July 5th: 16 minutes & 42 seconds

• July 10th - July 12th: 15 minutes & 33 seconds Implemented Social League

While the prior data looked at two weeks before SL was implemented, this section examines the dates 1th of August to 12th of September 2020, a period where Social League was implemented. The average game time was 17 minutes & 45 seconds.

Retention rates were 23% day 1, 10% day 3, 4% day 14, and 3% day 21.

• August 14th - August 16th: 17 minutes & 44 seconds

• August 21st - August 23rd: 19 minutes & 8 seconds

• August 28th - August 30th: 18 minutes & 33 seconds

• September 4th - September 6th: 19 minutes & 22 seconds

4.3 Design Process

As GTG has two games, both got a new design of the respective Social League. The design for World Football Manager can be found in Appendix B. Below, the new design for World Hockey Manager will be presented together with the design prior to the update.

After sending out the user form to get information about player behavior in SL, it was possible to start experimenting with a new design for the feature. While taking the opinions into account, it was also important to get Gold Town Games’ perception of what the feature should be. So, for 8 weeks the design process was continuously worked on with pure design decisions being made as well as introducing some new features into Social League.

Fig. 4.8 represents the "Search" page before the update:

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4.3. Design Process 23

(a) Search page (b) Create group popup FIGURE4.8: Search page before update.

Fig 4.9 presents the updated first page the user enters when going into Social League. While being mostly the same, more focus was made on the search feature to get people to join more active groups or if they had a name of the group their friend played in. This meant updating the list so that active groups pop up more frequently as well as more fitting groups for each player. After joining a group, a welcoming message pops up. This was a new detail requested from GTG where the admin of the group can write a message for all new players. The application points towards writing a fun message and/or typing in some rules which each player is supposed to follow. This was something that wasn’t possible in the previous version that both GTG and the users’ found was lacking. This message can be found under the "i"

button later as well.

(a) Updated search page (b) Confirmation popup (c) New create popup FIGURE4.9: Updated views of the "Search" page.

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4.3.1 Dynamic Icons

One of the central tasks during the thesis work was to make the chat and Social League a more central part of the app, which naturally concluded in researching engaging features to implement to the app. All visualisations of these icons can be found in Fig. 4.10, Fig. 4.11, & Fig. 4.12.

Visual cues around Social League

While creating a new Social League, it was also important to create curiosity around the feature. Since Social League is not available until the player manages to get to level 5, this can be an important factor in getting people to join a group. To get these users to continue playing, dynamic icons and extra animations were created. These hints are supposed to push information about Social League outside of the feature.

While getting players to join a group is easy, for example with a mission, stating that you should ’join a social league group’, getting them to continue playing when they started off the game by not doing so, might be harder.

FIGURE4.10: Animation when ranking up in Social League

(A) New friend online (B) Unread loan offer (C) Unread chat message FIGURE4.11: Dynamic Social League icon with different states

FIGURE4.12: Banner at top of start page when Social League ended

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The images above are all designed to increase the knowledge and curiosity around Social League. The first image is displayed above the SL button when you have increased in rank. The same happens but with a red arrow if you lose ranking while Social League is active. The second image is different states of the Social League button. Each state Flashes in the color and then enters a passive mode where the background is white. These three states were considered most important which is why no more states were added. This will hopefully create more curiosity around the feature and will get players to go into Social League. Lastly, the most recent event will decide which state the button will be.

The last image is placed on top of the screen when the player logs into the game after a Social League has ended, e.g. Monday. This will tell the user that SL has ended for the week and what rank they placed with the group. This will hopefully get players to enter Social League even though it is not currently active. The banner disappears after a short time window or by clicking the ’X’ in the top right.

4.3.2 Chat

One of the key areas during the thesis work was around the chat feature. As stated in the Theory- and Method section, a possibility for users to communicate with each other will hopefully strengthen the engagement in the application. Shown below is the old chat window in Social League. In the previous version, it was only possible to send messages to each other without any emotes or other forms of showing emotions. From the questionnaire, most players felt this window lacked depth and interest, creating inactive forums for the groups. Fig. 4.13 presents the old chat window.

FIGURE4.13: Old view of the chat window.

By looking at the feedback from users, talking with GTG, and researching the sections mentioned in the Theory chapter, it was possible to come up with some new interesting features within the chat. Fig. 4.14 show the updated version of the chat window.

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(a) Overview of the chat window (b) Popup when sending a GIF

(c) Popup when sending a loan waiver (d) Confirmation popup when signing a loan waiver FIGURE4.14: Updated chat feature.

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This new version creates a more visually appealing design based on Normans design guidelines [17] as well as introducing new features. The user can now send GIFs to the group, look at results from other players’ games as well as sending and accepting loan waivers. The latter was created by request of GTG and some users to increase the overall feeling of being a part of the community. This enables players to discuss and send players between the teams and, hopefully, getting the social group to a higher standing.

The visual design of the chat window was made from the visual guidelines stated in the Theory section while maintaining the style which the overall app had previously.

The element which stood out the most was the player card which was not presented in Social League before. This design was taken from the coaching overview view which enables the player to click the card to get more information about the specific player. A game summary was also introduced as a fun way to get the group to see other results. This was a small but important detail that will hopefully start some discussions in the chat.

4.3.3 Overview

Fig. 4.15 below is the previous "start" page when entering the social group. While being effective when Social League is active, the page is very dull when waiting for the next league. As one can see, around 40% of the page is occupied with the name of the group and when the next league starts. This had to be changed when designing the new overview window. Update of this view can be found in Fig. 4.16.

FIGURE4.15: Old view of the team overview.

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(a) Introduction popup (b) Admin view (c) Info page with notification settings FIGURE4.16: Updated overview feature.

Above is the updated overview with some new features. The first image is the popup that shows up when first entering a group. This provides the user with the message the admin entered when creating the league. Since the users felt that it would be good to get more connection with the players, this is a good way of getting all players on the same page, for example with group rules.

The second image shows the overview page as well as the admin functionality. As you can see, the container where the name and the next social league is presented is much smaller with some extra information. One can now enter a match directly from the Social League instead of having to navigate to the start page and play a match from there. The current reward is also shown within this container. Further- more, the admin can now kick players directly from the overview as well as promote other members to an admin position. The "Invite" button is presented to all members when a position is open to get more groups that are full, increasing the engagement withing each group. This enables users to invite their friends when a position is open, something that was not possible before.

Lastly, the third image shows the popup which occurs when clicking the "i" in the top right corner. For normal members, this shows the same text that was presented in the welcoming popup as well as enabling customization of notifications from the group. These notifications are presented in the dynamic icon shown above in this section. For the admin, the only change is that he/she can change the text instead of only reading it.

4.3.4 Stats

This was one of the most requested features from the questionnaire. Players felt like there were far too few statistics in the game. Since this feature is built with a group, it was not possible to get statistics for each team, but rather some sort of high score for the entire group. This created a very interesting possibility of increasing engagement. Fig. 4.17 shows the design of this introduced feature.

Designing for Engagement: Effects of Social Features in Mobile Manager Games