Goals | Metrics | Research | Design Process | User Testing | Business Alignment | Outcomes

Purpose
Stakester was originally created in 2019 as a synchronous 1v1 competition platform, for players on console games. After in-depth market research and user segmentation analysis of the legacy application, the company expanded their service offering. The expansion service, Stakester Arcade, was launched on December 6th 2021, as a mobile gaming competition platform that facilitates an asynchronous 1vE play model for users (B2C) and an alternative monetization solution for mobile games publishers and developers (B2B). Moving into the hyper casual mobile gaming market and creating a monetization solution that didn’t monetize users by way of the “classic three” (ads, subscriptions, and in-app purchases) was forecasted as a competitive advantage and business need. The Stakester Arcade service would solve player segmentation, found within the legacy service offering, and open new customer markets.

Approach
This project begins at kick off and understanding the value we’re building towards. We’ll address business needs, measurements of success, MVP constraints, and early research & discovery findings that ultimately aid in the building of the MVP Product. This project will also cover B2B client success functions and internal SOPs created and maintained to serve our clients and customers. Finally, this project will highlight outcomes and some data insights produced after the product launched.

Role
I served as a UX Designer, Head of Customer Success, and Head of Product at Stakester, over the span of 3 years. In this particular project, I owned the Product Management, Research, and UX Design alongside our Lead Product Designer.

The project began with kickoff and discovery meetings; we worked to understand the core needs of what we’re building and selling to prospective clients and customers. For the Stakester Arcade success criteria to be met and to properly disrupt and innovate the mobile gaming monetization market, we needed to take the following business needs into consideration:

• Must be based on a Zero Cost Acquisition Model

• Must be a superior competitor offering by way of quick & simple API integration

• Must serve to expand the targeted market (mobile games)

• Must result in recurring B2B & B2C revenue streams

• Must increase business brand equity by partnering with recognizable gaming companies

• Must be an asynchronous competition experience with automatic submission of scores

• Must stand up SOPs and build out feedback loops for onboarding clients

• Must create sales documentation and public-facing FairPlay model for B2B education

• Must be created on the legacy app and within the current UX framework & design system

• Must result in a successful proof of concept with data-backed evidence of a clear path to profitability, at scale

Along with the above, there we operational constraints to take into consideration. Stakester would have to own all competition costs, financial interactions, user data, prize accrual and distribution, technical infrastructure & maintenance, B2B comms, anti-cheat protections, and support needs. Finally, to uphold legal and user experience standards, Stakester required titles to adhere to a robust FairPlay models in order for titles to be considered for integration. We needed to build an MVP that B2B clients & customers could help shape, however, it needed to be built on top of our legacy app, quickly, with limited budget and limited internal resources, within 8 months.

The timeline needed to be lightweight enough to allowed the Dev, Product, Analytics, Research, and CS teams to do their daily BAU Stakester work alongside the Arcade experiment, but also churn out results and hit deliverable targets within 8 months time.

🥊Competitor Research

Competitor Research was conducted across various service offerings in the market; both direct competitors and indirect competitors. Trend timelines, a robust competitor analysis, and some competitor profiles were set up to help us better understand the market, users, and trends. Below is a competitor assessment looking at indirect competitors and a report that showcases how Stakester would differentiate against marketshare holders.

Competitor Assessment

Key Findings

• Very few competitors in the space are spearheading this type of service

• Indirect competitors corner the market in their 1v1 gameplay offering as opposed to a 1vEveryone offering

• The less obtrusive the service is to gameplay the more users seem to rate it highly

• Most of these communities are dominated by sharks (users who win all the time)

• Publishers would be very interested in how vetting for games would work (considering the legal requirements of the FairPlay model)
  

🤝Partner Research

17 Publishers and developers were contacted, for a 1 hour discovery call, through different outreach channels (Discord groups, Facebook groups, and word of mouth out reach from mobile games industry contacts).

Selling the concept meant pitching this unique USP to small-to-mid independent publishers and devs to gather actionable feedback. Publishers would have to find value in our service and their users would need to be compelled to play. Developers would have to see ease of integration and continual maintenance on the product. As a business, this was to be a zero cost acquisition venture, where users converted from already established titles. Publishers and Devs would have to entrust us with their users.

Key findings

• Integration needed to be straight forward and non-labor intensive

• There needed to be clear technical documentation to cut down on interfacing and meetings

• Slow feature or maintenance rollouts would be a dealbreaker

• Stakester needed to own customer-facing support channels

• Revenue dashboards needed to be accessible at any time to clearly see financial impact that arcade was having on their product

  
  

👥User Research

15 different people were used as a measurement of to get varying views of feedback. Requirements: users must be between 18-55 and play mobile games, at least once a week. Secondary research suggested that 74% of women play mobile games so 6 men and 9 women were interviewed for the discovery research. A persona was built using the insights gathered through these discovery calls (NOTE: this persona would ultimately be iterated and refined throughout the product’s lifecycle using new research initiatives and data).

Key findings

• Understanding how this service functions and clear UX was a sticking point for almost all the participants

• Almost all participants had low risk tolerance

• Almost all participants asked if there would be chat or community features with other players

• Almost all participants did not self-identify as a “gamer”

• Half of the participants want to have the ability to play for not only cash but prizes — potentially a prize only offering

• All participants would like to know what their score is after each submission

Alignment with Product, Dev, and CS uncovered MVP standards and acceptance criteria. MVP screens would need to contain acquisition funnels from partner app, 18+ sign-up, financial transactions (both depositing & withdrawing), showing users where they placed on the leaderboard, activity receipt, quick replayability, and engaging our losing players. The experience needed to be served within the partner game flow and be as unobtrusive as version possible. A design brief was used to help aid in the MVP needs, constraints, and timelines. Below is an example of the design brief:

• The user journey, first and foremost, should focus on users being acquired through the partner apps.

• Focus less on users coming through Stakester first.

• We have legal sign off to utilise advertising space and push notifications, as well as other marketing channels, within our partner games.

• We should look into ways to reduce friction for android users.

• We should think about promotional options for reducing the friction, including free entries. If there are ways we can get around legal requirements, i.e. only having physical prizes, in order to reduce friction, we should consider them.

• We should not be limited by technical requirements, but we should try to where possible reuse parts of the infrastructure to reduce development time.

• Deliverables need to include User journeys, Clickable prototype, and Technical considerations for buy-in

As the Stakester Arcade Product Manager, I facilitated workshops with Development, Product, Research, and CS departments to understand concerns and considerations, along with areas of opportunity, pain points, and mitigation needs. After gathering feedback, How Might We was employed to quickly consider all of the design needs & constraints to guide the UX process. Below are some examples of questions we asked to get to the heart of the UX and some early stage wireframes:

• How might we ensure our participants are 18+?

• How might we login through player ID and create a Stakester account?

• How might we getting IDs verified?

• How might we collect entry fees?

• How might we pay winners?

• How might we notify losers and engage them to re-entry?

• How might we make this quick and seamless for easy re-entry?

• How might we enact a cool-down effect for top players?

• How might we engage mid-to-low tier players?

• How might we show leaderboards?

• How might we show when daily leaderboards have ended?

• How might we notify when the daily has begun?

The designs needed to be incredibly lightweight for easy development and the ability to be quickly iterated on using data and research. The UI would also need to consider the above How Might We points. Above are some examples of the first iteration designs. Users needed to understand what they were doing before they entered a game, there needed to be clear visual representation of prizes so that users could understand the value of their efforts, and they needed to understand their leaderboard position (after submission), while having an unobtrusive way of navigating between their gameplay experience and Stakester Arcade. Many enhancements would be added to the final live product after running usability tests.

After the lightest weight MVP was built, usability testing was deployed to test the conceptual service and design decisions. The first round of usability testing was deployed in a contextual inquiry on the live app, with 5 participants, who fit into the Stacey Persona (using a screen survey as a qualifier). Below are the general findings of early usability testing:

Key Findings

• ❤️  All participants loved a try-before-you-buy free entry ticket.

• ⚠️  Over half of the participants did not recognize the games that are offered on Arcade — however, this did not deter them.

• ⚠️  Over half the participants were a bit surprised that they would have to download the game, and this is where we see a big drop off.

• ⚠️  Replayability was very important. As Stacey relies on familiarity being able to easily replay her favorite games will be important for her.

Departmental alignment was pivotal to ensure smooth onboarding of new B2B partners but limited time and budget meant we had to be scrappy. This side of the business had never been created before, so lifecycle advocacy and onboarding SOPs were lead by me and built out/maintained by the larger Customer Success team. Above and below are some examples on how we visualized the experience for both internal teams and external clients.

Client Onboarding flow was used to highlight what departments are involved when and the happy path to game launch, post-integration. This flow was used to kick off our first relationships with B2B partners and was refined further as we signed on more clients.

Internal Tracking System was a simple internal solution used for continued alignment calls and for the Customer Success team and Account Managers to report back to partners, during their integration lifecycle.

The Partner HQ was a client-facing hub sent out to clients, upon signing their contracts. This set stage expectations for their onboarding experience.

With just over a year live in the market, 0 cost in advertisements, thousands of users passing through our service, and gaining proof of concept data; the Stakester Arcade service secured several opportunities with B2B partners moving towards titles with significantly higher MAU. These partnerships include AAA mobile game companies like CrazyLabs and Miniclip. Along with signing on AAA partners, 11 titles were integrated with companies like Enigma, Flying Ants, Hermit Crab Studios, AJ Development, SO Games, Karma Games, Solaris, Veniso, and Maysalward.

🗓  We closed out the project under budget and under the original estimated 48-week timeline

🎯  We tripled our entries success metric (10,000 entries submitted) with almost 40,000 entries submitted

🤑  We spent $0 on acquisition costs and produced 0 external ads

🕹  We released 11 separate titles with 10 publishers, doubling our title/publisher success metric (5 titles and 5 publishers)

⚠️  We identified and closed 10 loopholes that users could exploit and aided partners in deploying those fixes; upholding our FairPlay and anti-cheat model

⚙️  We created a robust technical knowledge base to help educate our future partners

🐛  We deployed 3 critical bug fixes

🗂  We created 2 case studies into the success of the offering and the concept of the service

🏢  The most signifiant change; a new arm of the business was built out.

• Partner onboarding process was setup and owned by CS

• Internal partner integration tracking SOPs were created

• Marketing, technical, and partner alignment pipelines were created

Next Steps

With various opportunities on the table for Stakester Arcade, we’re at the early stages of building and planning for an increased B2B industry demand. However, Stakester Arcade is still in its infancy as a fully functioning arm of the organizational business, through the lens of mass user acquisition and as a professional facing B2B solution. There are several considerations we’ll need to assess, prioritize, solutionize, iterate, and refine in order to serve as a B2C and B2B service offering, both as a business and as a technical product (see below for timeline estimations and top level product iterations). Stakester Arcade is currently engaged in a profitable buyout.

Estimated Prod Timeline Stakester 2023