Marketing Promotion Mini-game
Geocaching is a real-world, hide-and-seek adventure game that was founded in 2000. Regular promotions encourage players to engage more with the game. The promotional illustrations were created by the marketing creative team.
My contributions
Designed and validated a responsive promotional page that increased engagement 8% YoY
Actively communicated with stakeholders in marketing, front-end, and mobile
Ran multiple iterations of prototypes through usability tests with target users
Created redline documentation
Problem
How might we increase the reach of our summer marketing campaign?
Geocaching players were increasingly moving to the mobile apps, but the annual summer marketing promotions only ever appeared on the website.
Process
All hands on deck
This project required coordination with most teams at the organization. Marketing was responsible for the theme and the game rules. The marketing creative team was responsible for the illustration and branding. The mobile team was responsible for notifying players of the promotion and linking to an embedded web responsive page. The web teams were responsible for creating links into the promotion and building the promotional page itself.
Make it a game
The theme of the promotion was mystical creatures. Players could collect rewards by finding a certain number of geocaches. The more geocaches you find, the more creatures you collect.
My first idea was to push the design as far as possible and make the promotion really feel like a game. I specifically investigated a progress-locked-map design so users could easily understand their progress. The stakeholders liked the idea, but preferred a simpler, reusable design. The front end team also preferred that the promotion stick to the existing style guide as much as possible.
Simple, reusable
With this feedback, I pivoted to a simpler, achievement-like grid display. I kept the progress bar and iterated on the design until I found a size that was as small as possible for mobile, but still large enough to showcase the illustrated, digital rewards.
Validation
No spoilers
Because these promotional games are mostly used by very engaged users, I needed to be able to run usability tests on this audience without leaking the creative creatures theme. I created a fake theme for the promotion that I could use in testing. I made heavy use of Sketch’s symbols functionality to swap between the actual promotional content for stakeholders and the fake content for usability testing.
Usability testing
For usability testing, I looked at the two primary personas for the promotion: newer, engaged players and seasoned, digital-rewards-motivated players. I ran a series of remote tests looking for problems interacting with and understanding:
The promotion itself and
The entry points introducing and linking to the promotion
Some of the usability findings and recommendations
Some notable findings that molded how we moved forward:
The email marketing copy was heavy on the thematic elements of the promotion. This confused most players tested. Recommendation: Describe the promotion is simple, direct language.
Players thought they needed to find specific geocaches when any geocache would meet the requirements. Recommendation: Describe the promotion is simple, direct language.
On both web and mobile, the testing did not reveal major difficulties with the promotion entry points.
Newer users did not understand what the digital rewards (souvenirs) were. This was a major problem that we flagged to be considered in a future project.
Final design on desktop and embedded, native mobile
Response and future considerations
The Hidden Creatures promotion was the most engaging promotion so far. Specifically the number of individuals that interacted with the promotion was up 8% from last year.
Qualitative feedback from more advanced players showed that they wanted a more complicated promotion. Perhaps a future promotion can have different levels of complexity depending on the how involved players are with the game.