UX • UI • VISUAL • PRODUCT MANAGEMENTREwarded Play LETS PEOPLE EARN GIFT CARDS FOR PLAYING THE MOBILE GAMES THEY LOVE.
Influence Mobile is an incredible and supportive team and was a catalyst for growth in the areas of mobile design, remote teamwork, and product management.
It was also one of the most challenging products I’ve worked on.
MY CONTRIBUTIoNS
My role at Influence Mobile was to be the UX Lead (and really the only designer) in charge of our Rewarded Play Android app (and suite of other apps). I helped reskin the app and redesign the main functionality on two occasions, otherwise working on improving primary conversions and adding features requested from Leadership.
I was in charge of our Style Guide, wireframing and prototyping, version tracking and keeping a master chart of our flows. I worked on UX, copy, iconography, and some lite branding. I also participated as a Product Manager for a handful of features.
My contributions had a highly positive impact on our conversions and helped us stay on the Inc. 5000 list for four years in a row.
Shown: Parts of our onboarding experience, some released and some blue sky.
“The Nature Of The Beast”
This was easily the most frustrating role I’ve had due to the nature of our product. We were never able to implement a robust analytics service due to technical issues, so while we weren’t flying blind, we never achieved an easy-to-read summary of how our metrics were doing on any given day or release.
The core user experience, which was also the first 24 hours for our players and the main income-generating flow, involved installing 3 apps from the app store, playing them for two minutes each, and coming back the next day before earning your first gift card.
This is something that needed to be tested on our live product - I don’t believe we would have been able to effectively test a clickable prototype for this UX, so our usability testing had to be done on the live app.
Because of this, and the fact that we never implemented an effective A/B testing process, every release was a huge risk, and we only got to test one set of design updates at a time.
Having very low risk tolerance also meant that we had to limit our design updates to things that were very minimal, rather than testing out braver, more wide-reaching design updates. This meant that a lot of fun and possibly game-changing design ideas sat in the Icebox for months or years, which was frankly bad for morale.
To be clear: GREAT TEAM. The company took SUCH good care of us. But for a designer, the “nature of the beast” involved feeling somewhat neutered in terms of impact.
Shown: Two different ways we encouraged installs and engagement with installed apps - our Daily Challenge which rewards players for completing 3 activities in a certain time, and our Elite Challenge which rewards our top-spending players for installing a new app.