how to grow your game with community featuring tayber voyer

How to Grow Your Game With Community#UAisHard Webinar with Tayber Voyer

Host

[email protected] | @tapstreamApp | #UAisHard

Mack Flavelle

Biz Dev: Tapstream

Organizer: #UAisHard

mailto:[email protected]


Guest


Tayber Voyer

Designer/Producer: A Thinking Ape

Founder: Vancouver Mobile Social Games

Consultant: Social/Mobile growth



About Tayber




Challenges of GrowthFinding new sources of GOOD users.

(Good because they spend money.)(Good because they bring friends.)

First day retention.

Long term engagement.

Reengaging lost users.




41 Shades of BlueYes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.

- Douglas Bowmanhttp://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/business/01marissa.html?pagewanted=print

http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html



Design Spectrum


Joshua Porter’s UX London 2010 Presentation

http://www.slideshare.net/bokardo/metricsdriven-design-4317168



Designing for Growth




Implications

You should incorporate user feedback into yourproduct roadmap but you shouldn’t let player feedback steer the roadmap.

Test your assumptions and player behaviour against your data, and align both with your business objectives.




Local Maxima Problem




Minimum Viable Feature




KAW Example

Hypothesis Social behaviour drives our player engagement and combining that with limited time promotions would help encourage players to play.




FeatureWe ran new promotions every day for a month. Everyday someone would manually change the time the promotion started and ended. We used the forums to communicate the promotions to the players. We ‘hacked’ it in.

If it was successful we would build a promotion tool to automate the process.




Hack it in




Results- Metrics


The results were mixed.

Only 1 promotion was effective.



New Content


We tried cloning the effective promo based on metrics but without looking at the context of why it was popular.



ResultsNo Luck. Small boost in engagement metricsbut nothing compared to when we put a promo on our best Epic Battle.

We realized that a promo tool wouldn’t be effective and cloning the Epic Battle didn’t work either.

As result we wasted very little resources.




Make it Social


What if we gave players the power to start an Epic Battle for their clan?



Implications

We kept the idea of promotion but we allowed players to use rare drop items or a premium purchase to run the promo themselves for their clan.

We never would’ve found this solution without the context of player feedback.




New Local Maxima




Feedback Channels

Customer Support

Instant feedback

Community




Customer Support


Bug reporting

Account support



Instant Feedback


Launch feedback Outages Urgent bugs Pulse of the game



Community


Game feedback contests Community building Inform player base Announcements



Dedicated Beta TestersLow risk

Prosfocused feedback, you can build a diverse group of beta testers

Conslow reach, potential for abuse, no testing at scale, requires a lot of organizing Best used for testing mechanics that aren't easy to predict on a large scale.




Full Beta TestMedium - high risk

Prostesting at scale, volume of player feedback is large, compensation for problems not always required

ConsFeedback is not focused, beta test affect player expectations, players aren't honest about competitive play, player behaviour in beta features is not the same as a normal feature




Hidden Beta TestHigh risk

Consplayer feedback is not focused, if something goes wrong you have to apologize and offer compensation, volume of feedback is huge, player expectations are higher.

ProsFeedback and data tend to be more accurate.




Recap1. Balance design assumptions with player feedback and

data to understand the context of your features.

2. Player feedback part of your core product cycle.

3. Optimize around local maxima, use data and community feedback to find new local maxima.

4. Use Minimal Viable Features to test your hypotheses before implementing robust feature sets.

5. Collect feedback and build community.




Predictions?




Round of Applause!


Thanks Tayber!@tvtayber

Stick around to hear how Tapstream can help you grow organically.



How to Grow Your Game Organically#UAisHard Webinar with Tayber Voyer

how to grow your game with community featuring tayber voyer

Self Improvement

uaishard webinar

context of player feedback

volume of player feedback

cons feedback

pros feedback

volume of feedback

user feedback

player behaviour