Mobile Casino Lobby
Designing and testing wireframes for a brand new mobile casino game.
Overview
My company started developing a mobile casino game in collaboration with a major IP. As the lead UX designer, I was assigned the task of bringing everyone's ideas together and developing the new UI and navigation model for a virtual slot app. The main lobby and Slot HUDs play a crucial role in determining both early and long-term user retention.
Project Goals
Lean on industry standards and user testing to validate design decisions in order to create the main lobby of a new mobile slot game where the core MVP features of the game will be located.
Tools and methods
Wireframing
Prototypes
Competitive analysis
Sketching
User flows
Getting started
I began by meeting with stakeholders and team members to understand the market and its users, as well as the core loop proposed by the leadership. It became apparent that there was an immediate need to define the information architecture of our game. Specifically, we needed to begin that process by tackling the main lobby.
Whats going in the game?
I started taking inventory of what features were planned to go into the game. I set up meetings with our Sr.Director of Game Design and VP of Product to discuss their priorities as they related to the core game loop.
I found that there were six must have features for MVP.
MVP Features
Missions
Side missions and quests add additional goals to increase user motivation, which resulted in improved retentions.
Daily Bonus
A standard feature across all mobile casino games that provides users an allowance of coins
Battle Pass
rewards milestones to help track users' progression.
Store
Key feature for any free to play mobile game
Collections
Users find high-value memorandums themed around our exciting IP.
Promotions
Product driven sales that tie into the store and live ops
Comparative Analysis
Once I understood what features were key, I decided to perform a competitive analysis using games from our portfolio and games that were major competitors in the space.
Why do it this way?
By combining the UI analysis with the ergonomic heat map and heuristics, I was able to determine the following:
1. A scalable layout capable of accommodating essential future features.
2. The best practices and strategies for UI layouts.
3. Optimal placements for high-priority features, based on the intersection of ergonomics and visibility
Designs
I created 4 designs based on these findings.
2
1
3
4
Getting the team involved
The team saw significant potential with each of the proposals above. After engaging in discussions with stakeholders and user researchers, we narrowed down to two designs that we could present to our users for usability testing and research.
Option 1: Scalability
Option 2: Missions focus
Results
We tested 10 participants who were mobile casino players between the ages of 27 and 52. Their response was overwhelmingly in favor of the first option. However there were certain design decisions about option two they appreciated. The main take aways are as follow:
Keep features visible
Users much preferred option one because they could see everything all at once.
Social and profile together
Users much preferred the profile screen on the second option. They felt social, mail, and settings made sense there.
Missions Consistency
User's preferred option one because the missions asset stayed in the top HUD in lobby and slots play.
Don't cover slots space
Users all responded negatively to the missions asset being placed over the slot area.
Make info easy to find
Users made it clear that they all liked the information icon on the slot bottom HUD.
Big missions asset is misleading
Users felt that having a huge missions asset in the middle at the bottom was odd and made the game seem one dimensional.