Trophy

Overview

I am a product designer for Trophy, a Gaming Rewards Platform. We aim to help users discover, download, and play Web3 games by displaying them next to high-quality genre-specific Web2 games. The Trophy Arcade then drives retention by rewarding users for completing different in-game achievements. Users can instantly turn their gold into Crypto or Gift Cards from top brands.

In this case study, I will go over one of Trophy’s core features – Races, and how I explored a new direction for it to provide users with a fresh and more engaging experience.

Our existing rewards system

As mentioned, getting rewarded for playing mobile games is Trophy’s main value prop. Our original system was time-based, meaning that the more time a user spent playing, the more they earned, regardless of what in-game milestones they achieved. Time earned players experience points (XP). Earn enough XP and a player levels up. Every level-up comes with a reward in Gold.

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A short deep dive into Trophy's classic rewards ecosystem

Purpose: To reward gamers in crypto and gift cards for each minute they play Web2 & Web3 mobile games.

Problem: While examining our rewards model, we identified two core problems that we needed to address:

1. As long as the user has a game open and is not idle, they earn for every minute “played,” so there is no incentive to level up or progress.
2. There needs to be a sense of urgency. The time-based reward stays the same, so there is no new motivation to keep going.

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A new creative direction

With a new game mode defined, we explored the new direction for the trophy app as a whole.

We outlined our goals:

• Primary: Improve milestone completion rate by aligning player incentives 
• Increase engagement via challenge, competition, and urgency
• For direct business deals, boost targeted game stats with targeted incentives
• Reduce fraud from bot-users

And with this, the Race concept was slowly taking shape!

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Trophy Races – How does it work

In essence, the core functionality of Trophy stays the same – users play to earn but in a more gamified and engaging way.

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Gameplay‍

To tap into our player’s propensity for competition, we created Player Races. Trophy races push players to complete a specific milestone within a limited time.  For example: “Reach Level 4 in Candy Crush within seven days!”  When players start a new game, they go on a path leading to a large prize with specific criteria.

You can see this flow here 👇

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Visual Explorations 💡

I wanted to convey to users that they can earn rewards by just spending time playing. However, they would need to win to earn big and redeem prizes. Here are a few visual explorations that didn't work, but helped me reach the final design. 😊

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The Solution

The founders and I decided to go with the snaking path as our final UI. In comparison the the scrapped designs, this solution was much simpler.

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Rewarding users that didn’t win the race✨

Additionally, it’s essential to understand that users may not win the races, and the last thing we want is for them to get discouraged.

Once a user loses, we show a "2nd Chance" countdown that offers them a chance to get to the finish line in the next 48 hours and still earn 75% of the reward.

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Multi-leg races 🏁

Just because a race is over doesn’t mean we want the user to stop playing. Trophy has partnerships with games that continue to pay out users after the first milestone. For example, Lords Mobile may pay users who reach levels 5, 20, and 100. Each leg of the race behaves like an individual race, except the second and third legs are locked behind completing earlier races.  

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Collect the reward!

This last screen was where I had a lot of fun designing the rewards ladder, showcasing different types of rewards users would earn on their way to unlocking the first-place prize.

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Developer Handoff 💻

I created a style guide for developers to implement the screens. Here is a snapshot!

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To wrap it up,

Trophy Races was a fun re-design to work on. We are currently testing it with our users to understand if this improvement gives them extra motivation to earn Gold.

From our recent A/B test, most users “liked that they could earn more Gold than before.”

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Gamification  —  a whole new design experience 🕹️

Being the lead designer on the gamification project for the last year has been a challenging but also highly rewarding experience.

I felt more creative than ever in my new position, and while Races was just the start of our journey as a team, it was the right project to kickstart our gamification vision for Trophy.

To see more case studies on Trophy, please email me directly!

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