Connect - ASUS ROG Gamer Community
ROG Gaming Phone’s first gamer social networking
2020 -2021• ASUS UI/UX Designer • User Research / UX / UI / Prototyping
Intro
Connect is a built-in social networking app in ROG Phone series specifically for mobile gamers. It’s designed for gamers to share gaming information and media, create communities with different topics of discussion. The app was launched in August 2020 and we've seen significant increases in user engagement since then.
My Role
I was in charge end-to-end design from scoping product structure and specification to final launching and iteration.
Our team includes 2 designers, 1 project manager, 3 Android Engineers, 1 out-sourced web developing team, 1 marketing manager.
What I Did
Shaped product vision that brings values around users and formed roadmap with marketing team and project manager
Delivered designs, including use cases, user flows, wireframes, hi-fidelity interactive prototypes, specs, and annotations for onsite & remote dev teams
Utilized rapid prototyping to iterate and validate ideas
01. Introduction
The Problem: “How might we effectively build an exclusive communicating experience for ROG phone gamers?”
📂 Project Background
ROG Gaming Mobile Phone is facing the challenge of losing the market share, low retention rate and difficulty of expanding customer reach. The project was kicked off under providing more functions, improving customer loyalty and enhancing brand awareness in the next product. It was a start of the loyal membership program.
😫 The problem
When building a new social networking application, there are four main development challenges:
No user: Users are not aware of the new app/function on their mobile. It’s challenging and hard to get people to register an account in a new app.
No post, no relevant information or quality content
Privacy concern and cyber violence: One of the major concerns about social networking service is users' control over the privacy of their information and the cyberviolence which include sharing personal or private information causing embarrassment or humiliation and cyberbullying crosses the line into unlawful or criminal behavior.
Low engagement: Lack of or low level of user interaction
🎯 Goal
Boost the new function awareness, make the app easily discoverable and increase registration rate and user retention. Make onboarding process effective.
Trigger users interest and intention to share posts, provide clear guideline and make the posting journey seamless.
Help users stay safe and have positive gaming experience: Creating safe community space allows for more creativity and innovation.
Binding users as effortless as possible. The system has to identify the preferences and supply them accordingly.
02. Process
Research & Insight: I partnered with user researcher to get insight of building a social gaming platform. In order to increase engagement, match users expectations and make design content-centric, all the functions and product plans are built based on three key points: Empowered Content, Safe Environment and Gamer Connection.
Function & Roadmap: The roadmap helps the team to prioritize and communicate the future work and problems to solve. Marketing team and product team were both included to build the plan for next gaming phone and define the achievement for each generation.
Communicate: One thing I learned from the design process is co-creating ideas with dev teams early on was very effective and helpful. As part of the research and iteration effort of this project, I participated to develop features we wanted to focus on.
Design and Validate: I started the project by defining the Information Architecture. It is a first pass to get a handle on the complexity and further to create wireframes and user flow. I prototyped and validated ideas through various tools such as Principle and InVision. With ASUS internal testing APK and testing environment, I was able to conduct A/B testing and QA testing to ensure the functions are the highest quality for users.
03. Key Design Outcomes
*Noted that below are a collection of various key features and are implemented in production app
I. Simple Onboarding Process
Features
Simplify the onboarding process to reduce users’ time and effort
The process is as short as it can get. And another better way to engage users is providing options for them to connect some other account to the app.Promote the new function and provide multiple entry points
In order to boost the awareness of the new social networking function, it is merged to one of the most important built-in app, the gaming center on the phone. As a general usability principle, it provides openness and flexibility which allows users to register during the OOBE (Out-of-box experience)process or after exploring the apllication.
Result
Registration rate increases 30% in the first three months after the phone was released to the market (compare to the last model).
II. Empowered Content
Features
Gamification- Address users to spark activation with different mission and provide prizes, like verified users and posts, users badges, profile page customization(Personal Branding Profile), unlocking features and the opportunity to participate in virtual events
II. Empowered Content
Features
Onboarding post - User onboarding is a designed series of interactions and/instructions that help the user ease into the product’s experience. We provide clear guideline and seamless posting journey for users to start their first post, further to earn points and unlock features. It helps building valuable information to the community.
Various types of content - Increase the type and the quality of content they deliver, strong user content feed with a unique flavor
Research
Process - Our research approach encompassed in-depth in-field observation, qualitative analysis, and quantitative methods. By understanding users' motivations, behavioral triggers, and needs, we crafted a product that truly resonated with them. Our iterative design process, fueled by user feedback and experimentation, ensured constant refinement and evolution. The combination of qualitative and quantitative insights provided a holistic understanding of our users, resulting in a user-centered product that exceeded expectations.
Insight - Through in-field observation and user interviews, we discovered that many new users felt overwhelmed when starting their first post. They found it challenging to navigate the posting process and often abandoned it. To address this, we redesigned the onboarding post feature to provide clear guidelines and a step-by-step tutorial. This significantly reduced the friction and hesitation users experienced, leading to a higher completion rate of initial posts and increased user engagement.
III. Securing the online environment and personal information
Features
Cyber violence as online behavior that constitutes or leads to assault against the well-being (physical, psychological, emotional) of an individual or groups. We use Two Hat’s AI-powered content moderation platform to classify, filter, and escalates messages, usernames, images, and videos. With an emphasis on surfacing online harms including cyberbullying, abuse, hate speech, violent threats, and child exploitation, we foster safe and healthy user experiences for users.
With the report system, users can also help removing illegal contents without fear of harassment or abuse.
Aware to help users stay safe and have positive gaming experience through providing option to remove personal data when uploading photos and other media
Show core values of user data security and privacy protection to differentiate from the competitors: Transparency (Users have full control over their personal information.) and clear purposes (Users will always know why exactly we collect and use their personal information) For example, we are working on generating random numbers in data security systems when users are posting genuine reviews of our products. We will never use the collected data for any purposes that users haven't agreed to, nor shall we include it in further processing.
Next Improvement
Apple, Google are raising awareness and promote privacy. Google I/O 2021 brings focus on security and privacy. Users now have options to decide how they want the app access to their data. Iterate better privacy-enhancing settings based on users preference.
IV. Customized contents and groups
Features
Offer users the opportunity to establish and join groups of people online. Help group posts and conversations around a similar topic so user can easily find and follow what interests them.
Easier access to the topic button and group card to customize feeds. Through users feedbacks, we learned that the tags on each post were barely used. We also noticed users tend to watch more content when they receive recommendations from a variety of posts and they like to diversify their suggested feed.
Result
Time spent per active users 30%↑
Topic browsers 3~8%↑
Group browsers 2~5%↑
Improvement
Iterate better suggest mechanism based on users activities to serve the most relevant, personalized recommendations to each user
There’re still room to improve the trending feature. It will provide a feed of new and popular content in a user’s specific country based on heavily considering view count and rate of engaging growth.
04. Conclusion
I am thankful that I had this great opportunity to build a product from 0 to 1 at scale for the global audience. I've learned a tremendous amount of experiences, especially on how to make it accessible for users to accomplish their goals and desirable for them want to create content and engage with for a social media/gaming platform. Growth is about finding the truth of how our product grows and what drives our user’s behaviors. Experiments are the tool to uncover that truth. We had substantial growth in numbers of users and posts. So from a business perspective, it’s a success.
NOTE
Please contact me at cindyw1211@gmail.com if you are interested in more details of the project.