You can lead a gamer to a homepage, but you can’t make them stay.
The problem: the homepage of the Hearthstone website has a heavy focus on new player acquisition. In light of Hearthstone’s player base reaching more than 50 million players(at the time), we would like to evolve the homepage to also include player retention and player win-back as key goals.
Fun Fact: This project was for an open role at blizzard, I had so much fun working on it I like to include it in my portfolio.
I laid out a plan that involved multiple forms of research, to validate that this is an issue, and find insights to inform solutions.
Player Input
Gamers are very vocal when it comes to negative feedback, leverage hearthstone’s own forums, surveys, and reviews to isolate common requests and grievances.
Survey players for insights and motivations
Ask the eSport Pros and Top Streamers
Discover what our pros need on a homepage or what they’ve heard from their viewer base
Widespread Competitive Analysis
Examine industry sites to determine what acquisition, retention, win-back practices are in place today
From the CA identify and group common and recurring themes for each acquisition, retention, and win-back.
Observe users interact with competitor homepages
Card Sorting
Run internally and on users, determine if a new IA map is needed to match user expectations of a game homepage.
Learning opportunity for internal team, that they are not the customer.
Before I moved into any qualitative studies I took some time to evaluate the online communities and the top competitors.
Newbie Zones.
A consistent theme found across online communities for Hearthstone was, newbie help. If hearthstone’s homepage provided access to this information would players continue to return?
Streaming.
Hearthstone could take advantage of it’s streamers by embedding the top streams or esports events. Or possibly teaming up with top streamers to promote tools and new site updates.
Competitive Landscape.
The results mostly revealed that the competitors were on par with Hearthstone’s homepage; this left us plenty of room to improve and hypothesize.
For the survey, I was going to have to search far and wide for a group of gamers that matched this user group…
Not quite, I sent a group text message to my friends and got a bunch of hits. I moved forward with a qualitative study with active gamers (25-35), primary questions positioned around motivations to return to a game, and repeated website visits.
A few questions, and responses:
What would motivate you to return to a game that you enjoyed playing in the past 1-2 years but have not played in the past 6 months (not playing at all, not following pro scene)?
“If it's something that would make coming back more enjoyable like more missions, then i’d definitely be compelled to get back into the game”
“...if it's like "come back now to weapon skins" I could give a $%#@, but if it's something that would with make coming back to the game more enjoyable or like adds more missions then I'd definitely be compelled to get back into the game”
What would make you return to a game that you did NOT enjoy playing and have abandoned (not playing at all, not following pro scene) in the past year?
“Once you fall out of love with a game it would honestly take a large DLC to bring me back and i’d have to know it was good” - referencing “The Division 2”
“If the base game didn't grip me enough, then content might not be enough, in which case there's almost nothing you could do to bring me back”
What would make you continually return to a the game developer’s or publisher’s website?
“I like how Battlefield's battlelog, you can track your progress and performance with everything”
“Stats and inventory management if applicable. Also the ability to view a friends stats and compare side by side”
A few takeaways:
Keeping with the mission statement “Gameplay First” or UX in our case, content is king. Leveraging the prior research we have identified some player motivation to return to this page.
Varying player motivations & needs based on who visits the homepage, some features will be more relevant than others at any given point—personalization needed.
There are 3 main player groups to pursue: new, active, prospective/retired.
Phase 2, UX/Design
With the research completed and clear problems to solve, I moved into designing 3 states of the hearthstone homepage. These explorations would showcase how the homepage would need to react and evolve to meet user demands.
(present day control)
Each homepage below address content gaps associated with a users journey.
tl;dr
The problem: the homepage of the Hearthstone website has a heavy focus on new player acquisition.
I researched competitors, interviews gamers, and performed analysis on popular gaming sites for common themes.
I created a personalization plan targeting new, active, prospective/retired gamers.
My Contributions
Research (qual)
UI/UX Design