Work // Kongregate

Kongregate is a leading online indie games portal - started first as a burgeoning site where flash game developers can upload their games to the platform to earn a share of the ad revenue, a somewhat uncommon model about 12 years ago.

I joined the team in 2007 as the first designer as employee #9, bringing design in-house from the wonderful work that Happy Cog did for Kongregate for its initial phases. In the beginning stages, I focused on setting up a styles foundation for the design to be able to scale as the site grew, and working with product and engineering on building and designing new features. Over the years, I helped grow the portal to scale, and learned to rethink our outlook and strategies to use design to figure out challenges that comes along with growth.

Early on, we were quite fortunate to find a lot of success, exponentially growing our user base month-over-month. The first few months of development laid the foundations of an MVP, but as we grew, questions and problems we asked ourselves evolved as well. For example, “How do we get more people to create accounts?” became “How do we get players to invest in building their profiles?”

We had pretty clear product and business objectives and the primary user experience was focused on these goals to make the Kongregate platform as successful as it could be to meet business objectives, and prioritized which of those were important to the success of the product.

We realized pretty early on that if we made Kongregate the best place to play games, everything else - users, engagement, retention, monetization - will be much easier and stronger to build upon. We immediately started thinking of what would make the platform memorable to the players’ experience to get them to think of Kongregate every time they want to play games online.

We gathered from data that the vast majority of players made the game page their entry point into Kongregate, so it was important that the games became the center of the experience. Once players landed on the game page, we made it extremely low friction for players to start playing games, with in-browser play, fast loading, and no registration. The game itself is the main focus of the page, with peripheral information, including game instructions, ratings, and comments, as secondary information.

While it may be easy for a player to find games to play if they are actively seeking out more games, we wanted to build out other methods of organic discovery for games once players are nearing the end of the current game they’re playing. Getting players to jump into a 2nd gameplay in the same session was an important metric to us - this led to increased session length, increased returning visits, and account creation.

We designed sections for recommendations that would surface to the players in natural stopping points of their user journey to consume this content. The homepage contained broad logic for recommendations - top games, popular/trending, and new games lists.

Once a user is on a game page playing games, we’d narrow those lists down to be more specific to the game that user is playing, suggesting titles either of the same genre or by the same developer. We’d also built in a recommendations engine that took in account game play behavior and rating/favoriting, to determine games that a player may be interested in. At the same time, we wanted to clearly surface to the user why exactly they were shown these recommended games so they would have a better understanding of why they should try them out.

Now that we’ve captured an audience, we turned our focus to turning that audience into returning users, in player-friendly ways.

We built user journeys based on surveys and data, centering around how users play games, browse for more content, and socialize with others on the platform. Through this, we identified key conversion moments that hook guest players to creating an account with Kongregate, such as needing an account to chat, save progress, or earn achievements. We also made a big deal of reward moments, such as earning a high score or achievement, and made them happy moments of joy.

We took traditional game mechanics for driving players into a game and applied them to the platform in a way that was fun and meaningful to the player. To add some goals to game play, we handcrafted badges to players to earn while they’re playing the game. It was important to convey triumpt and accompliment at those points in their journey.

We also learned that players that earned 3 or more badges lifetime would have increased impact on how they engaged with the rest of the platform - more repeat visits, more game plays per session, more social activity with other players. Because of this, we designed different moments in the player’s visit to encourage them to try to earn the next badge or try a recommended game.