FOR ELECTRONIC ARTS
BEJEWELED BLITZ
TOURNAMENTS
The community of bejeweled players is so engaged, responsive and loyal, that it has truly been a community-driven experience. Here's a short case study from my work on the tournaments feature with the bejeweled blitz team at Electronic Arts.
NOTE: This is only a snippet of the ux workflow and outcomes and doesn't include any business goals or strategies.
Design & UX Pillars
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Create avenues for highly competitive play
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Create awareness of strategic depth among core players
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Provide a space for players to display skill and enjoy their 'winning' moments
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Create awareness and help players understand what they're doing well and what they aren't
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Introduce this feature as another important game mode and make its transition into the game smooth and easy to understand by reusing existing successful game flow patterns
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Since there will be multiple tournaments running at once, help players gauge different tournaments at the first glance. Highlight important information to help players make decisions.
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Make it look and feel easy for players to change their minds, because of the choice given to them.
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Since this is a complicated/fresh experience for our players, prototype and test important new mechanics
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With the depth of new rulesets (compared to existing mechanics) in play, make the transition seamless, avoid player-induced errors in the flow and provide guidance at each step of the way
Mental-Models, Experience Map
To start with, we mapped out the experience we wanted give our players (mental-model) based on the goals we set. This helped us understand what players may expect as they progress - how they may start the journey, all the possible outcomes after they've started, how the journey ends for a player etc. This gave us a brief idea of how much and what information to give them at each step of the way.
Information Architecture
After the initial step of mapping out the experience we wanted to craft for our players, we had an initial understanding of how to shape up the content strategy, early user flows etc. We also set out to bring in some level of hierarchy to establish what the focus should be at each step of the journey.
Wireframes & Paper Prototypes
Early wireframes were printed onto small sheets of paper. Each screen had different parts, printed separately, along with different buttons so that the team could mix and match a flow together.
What will a player do after finishing a game? Each tournament has details about the tournament as well as the leaderboard which comes in later. How do we display both these components to players? Do players need the info once they've played a tournament? Do players need a snippet of their leaderboard or the entire leaderboard at the end of each game? If a tournament is complicated, will they need a reminder of the rules etc. while deciding their strategy/deck for the game? So many questions were asked and assumptions, made.
All these assumptions would later be tested out with players using a high fidelity interactive prototype.
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While we think fewer is better, we found that a few extra clicks to hide less important information, thereby progressively revealing information to players made the journey a simple and smooth experience.
Prototype, Goals & Testing
A high fidelity prototype was made specially for this feature because of its complexity and new mechanics. Rather than just a click through prototype, proto.io helped us reach a deep layer of complexity, that gave players feedback based on different inputs. This was great, and helped us validate the feature with our players, as well as address the gaps in our assumptions.
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This also helped us understand what an MVP version of this feature would look like.
Here are two of the three different types of tournaments we tested out to assess whether they would understand the varying rulesets, important information like rewards across tiers etc.
Learning and Iterating
Two important learnings were -
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1) Make it easy for players to compare rewards across ranks. Most games that make this easy don't have too many types of rewards, so this became a tough challenge for us. We ended up changing the way players move between the 'info' and 'leaderboard' screens to accommodate this change. This was also done because rewards were more important to players and that tournament 'info' wasn't that important the second time around. Notice how the prototype houses rewards in tabs and the leaderboard > tournament-info interaction is established via a swipe, whereas in the actual game, players can swipe to compare rewards and the leaderboard > tournament-info swipe has been replaced with a toggle.
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2) Some players wanted easy access to a more detailed leaderboard in the game end screen and the common metaphor used did not cut it. Notice how we did away with the common metaphor (that opened both info and leaderboard) and stuck to distinct icons to represent them.
Rewards housed inside tabs
Common metaphor to open the full leaderboard. Auto swipe to help discover the swipe between leaderboard and info.
Actual game - Swipe to compare rewards easily. Toggle between info and leaderboard.
Check out Bejeweled Quest for an interesting case study about disguising slightly complex mechanics via a light narrative.