GregSchwartz.net

Project Description

Playdom wanted to find a way to let iPhone users play Social City, which was at the time our newest, most popular Facebook game. However, we didn’t want to simply port the game on to the iPhone; we wanted to create a version of the game that fit with the way people play games on mobile devices.

Skills Used

• Interaction design
• Wireframing
• Objective-C
• PHP

Design Process

I began by brainstorming ideas for what the core interactions of Social City were, since we wanted to make a unique version of Social City, not simply port the game to the iPhone. Social City’s core mechanic is a farming mechanic, so the obvious interactions were the build/harvest cycles of the buildings. However, I came up with a few other interactions (including playing up the social interaction within the game), and sketched them out as well. I then showed these sketches to my team, and iterated on them.

We then had a team-wide design meeting, where we brainstormed for additional features, and merged designs and ideas from other members of the team with my design.

Results

Two of the features I designed were especially exciting to me: showing when the player’s friends had helped the player, and sending push notifications when the player needed to harvest.

I’d played Social City heavily, and wished for push notifications so I wouldn’t miss harvesting. My coworkers had clamored for it as well, complaining that they’d missed harvesting contracts in time. It made sense; the game requires you to harvest quickly. It was such a useful feature that I knew it could be capitalized on to convince existing players to download our iPhone app. In addition, it would provide a valuable tool for reengaging players by literally reminding them that they had a reason to come play.

I was also very interested in the technical side of push notifications. I volunteered to implement push notifications on the iPhone (in Objective-C), and also co-developed the game’s push notification backend system (using PHP).

The other feature I was especially excited about was telling players when their friends had helped them. That feature was already part of the Facebook game, but I’d planned to expand on it in a few ways:

• The player would receive that information as push notifications. This would encourage them to come back to the game.
• Each time a friend helped them, the player would be offered a 1-click button that would send a Thank You Gift. The ease of sending a gift with a single click would increase the number of gifts sent.
• The natural, logical context of the feature would dramatically increase the number of gifts sent. Most Facebook games encourage you to send gifts when the user isn’t very likely to be interested in sending a gift. Cognitively, it feels grating and forced. But in this case, the player has just been notified that a friend helped them; sending a gift to show gratitude would feel quite natural.