Snapchat Games
Empowering learners through Snapchat daily games
Role
Product Design Engineer
Timeline
2 Week Onboarding Sprint
Team
2 Design Engineers
2 Developers
2 Product Marketers
Skills Leveraged
Mobile Design
Prototyping
Interaction/Visual Design
Project Overview
As an 11 day kickoff sprint to get into our product thinking, our intern pod was challenged with building out the MVP for a proposed Snapchat feature that alleviates a socially conscious issue and drives a call to action. Our given theme was the broad space of education and its market.
USER RESEARCH
Funneling our problem space through need finding
Education is a huge space and there's so many potential issues to tackle within it. In order to funnel down, we met with one of Snapchat's sponsors, a non-profit organization called CodeTalk. Their main mission is to build curriculum that teaches low income, underemployed, and underserved individuals coding principles. Hoping to gain insights into their experiences as educators, our team set up a need finding call with their board of executives.
Bingo. We now understood which problem we'd be trying to solve for: education inequality.
II. PROBLEM SPACE
Asking the right questions
We learned that the lack of visibility and access to educational resources not only limits opportunities of growth and success for earnest/capable learners, but it also instils a lack of growth mindset. From that finding, we extrapolated our guiding question:
How can Snapchat be used to increase visibility to educational resources in a way that engages and empowers?
III. USER PERSONA
Humanizing our target user
About 60% of Snapchat's power users are 24 and under, which means that even the upper half are indoubtedly students or early career graduates. Taking this analytic, we humanized our target user into someone who is student, someone unsure of her future and career.
IV. ALIGNING WITH PRODUCT ROADMAPS
Understanding Snap's business goals
We worked with Snap's product team to understand their 2024 primary business verticals, gaining insight into Snapchat's value to users, stakeholders, and where the company is headed. This analysis helped our feature development to maximize engagement and ad revenue, also ensuring the feature complemented Snapchat's established experience. Below is a graph I made showing some overlaps!
V. AFFINITY MAPPING
Throwing darts at a wall and seeing what sticks
We synthesized our findings from both our product research and the preliminary NPO partner interviews to identify common themes and trends. Here are a couple of the most noted (you'll see later how we implemented each and every one of these ideas!)
VI. OUR PROPOSED SOLUTION
Shaving down the ambiguity and chaos
VII. INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
Let's think about how this will structurally all flow together
VIII. GETTING INTO THE CODE
</Developing> the user experience and game logic
For the sample challenge included in the functional prototype, we chose the topic of coding. Within the challenge, the user is unknowingly writing their own algorithm while thinking they're playing a fun game . We drew inspiration from the block-programming model of Scratch, as well as Coding For Kids’ Python Development Course (PDC). Our priorities in designing the challenge were to…
make it approachable
avoid tedious/high-rate-of-error actions
avoid requiring specific domain knowledge
provide rewarding but not frustrating levels of difficulty
IX. UX COPY/CONTENT STRATEGY
Utilizing words to build up growth mindset
Although our daily games are just short term—mere minute—experiences, our goal was to foster long term success. We wanted to ensure the copy used was user-centric, letting the user know they are more than capable of achieving "difficult" tasks in which they may have lacked confidence in.
user "AHA!" moment
provides user with a sense of accomplishment and wonder
exposes user to new potential career path
provides steps that they can take to further pursue resources if interested
X. USABILITY TESTING
Let's host a design critique and test with Snapchat Executives
We got to meet with Ceci Mourkogiannis, the Vice President of Product for Snapchat to get her feedback on the feature. Here are just a couple of the most prominent iterations that we made based on her usability test:
Rethinking how to get users into the feature.
We agreed that at first, the feature could be displayed as a chat banner to garner more attention from Snap users worldwide. Once the feature reaches enough key performance indicators, it would live in the profile permanently.
Visualizing the weekly road map re-designs.
Visually, the old roadmap left corners of open space that made the screen look too empty. After many visual explorations, we settled on a more vertical map with more shadow depth to match the animated style of most video games.
XI. FINAL PROTOTYPE
Introducing Brain Bites: Snap Daily Games
XII. PRODUCT DESIGN SYSTEM
Adding a fun twist to Snap's pre-existing design system
This Design System was extremely fun to play around with, as I got to use the pre-existing components that Snapchat is known for while also adding my own pixelated twist as an homage to 70s and 80s arcade video games. It was also exciting getting to incorporate some of Snapchat's new sticker assets from their Less Likes, More Love campaign!
XIII. FEATURE ROLLOUT
The product marketing strategy for our campaign
XIII. THANK YOU
Shoutout to my sprint team
The kind, smart, and creative people behind Brain Bites; it was an honor getting to work on and pitch this sprint with you guys! Here's to more bowling and Din Tai Fung reunions soon.
