Overview

Not so long ago I had an interview for a Game UX job position. The company was Nordeus which makes a very well-known game "Top Eleven", as part of my preparation for the potential next round of interviews I've started this case study.

Before we dive deep into the research, I would like to preface that this is a personal project and that my intention with the case study was to provide, if at all possible, any significant insights that could potentially be used to improve the game experience. Some of my observations can sound tough, but it is all in the service of the players. Without further ado, let's get started.

Hypotheses

"I believe "Top Eleven - Be a Soccer Manager" game experience could be improved."

Design Process

Step 1 - 1st Research Phase

Without having many channels of feedback available, I’ve started with user reviews. Methodology: Note taking (User reviews) + Affinity Diagram.

Group 1: Live Game Flow

Game flow represents the state of enjoyment when the player is totally engaged and immersed in an intrinsically motivating activity, most objections are wrapped around live gameplay experience. The whole interaction depends on the live gameplay experience which is the source of feedback to the player and it’s affecting the game flow in a major way.

Good usability is not enough, putting a stronger focus on live gameplay and understanding what is critical for the player to see, feel, and control, in order to enter the flow, is crucial.

Group 2: Tactics Skills Strategy

The game environment makes some players feel like the value of the tactics, skills, and strategy are lost or don’t even exist in the game. This leads the player to perceive a game as an unfair experience which further leads to a lack of motivation and eventual frustration causing cognitive dissonance which is basically a mental state, a conflict of a few incompatible beliefs (Top Eleven simulation is realistic vs Tactics, skills, and strategy don’t exist in this game). Players perceive this as a failure and lead them to stop playing the game and decide that the game is “not worth playing”.

This badly influences the Top Eleven brand/reputation, especially for the new players that are seeking for a realistic football manager simulation game where they can compete and prove their skills and value in a fair and realistic environment. The influence that dissatisfied players can have on those who have yet to play the game can be huge and can lead new players to post-rationalize their decision not to play the game to avoid feeling the cognitive dissonance that dissatisfied players feel. This behavior can’t be blamed on the player, concepts of tactics, skills, and strategy need to be iterated properly and without ambiguity.

Group 3: Rewards

The mechanism of rewards is one of the objectives addressed by the affinity diagram. Rewards are closely connected with motivation which is connected with another group extracted from the affinity diagram and that is Return on Investment.

It is crucial for a reward mechanism to work properly, the absence of an expected reward can act as a punishment that affects the player’s behavior. If the player doesn’t get the reward that he expected (was promised to him) for a certain behaviour he would be less likely to repeat that behavior in the future.

My opinion is that the whole motivation mechanism should be examined because motivation is important and is one of the few major pillars of engageability.

Motivation and reward mechanism includes:

• Intrinsic Motivation

• Extrinsic Motivation

Intermittent Rewards:

• Interval Rewards (based on time)

• Ratio Rewards (based on behavior)

Group 4: Return on Investment

Time vs reward, energy vs value. One of the objections is that players often feel like the energy and time they invest in a certain activity is not worth the reward that comes after it, the bigger problem is that even that reward is not always delivered to them, which makes them feel cheated. This is another point where motivation plays a big role and lack of reward acts as a punishment.

From the wider point of view, the return on investment needs to be connected with intrinsic motivation as well, it's the sum of all energy, time, and engagement players investing in the game which leads us to the next category “Progress”.

Group 5: Learning

Player’s goals are a priority throughout the gaming experience. Being a manager, coach, or strategist is driven by intrinsic motivation. Those are the goals due to which players gravitate to the Top Eleven Football Manager game.

This category is a critical starting point for understanding and designing any part or mechanism in the game environment. Learning goals are closely related to “reward mechanism”, “progress”, “live game” and onboarding.

Group 6: Progress

Except for the demotivation that this objection is making on players, this deviates from the player’s essential goals.

The game needs to be designed in a way that embraces the player’s goals to learn, compete, and get recognized for accomplishments. People are more motivated when pursuing goals with personal meaning, the competition gives them the opportunity to compare their own performance with others which finally leads to recognition and an increase in internal motivation.

Group 7: Mismatch

When it comes to matching players with opponents, it is observed that there is some ambiguity with how ranks work. Players feel the same as for tactics, skills, and strategy “Does ranking even matters?”.

Group 8: F2P

The F2P business model for online games does not charge the player to join the game, revenue is generated through advertisements or in-game sales. The observation made from a qualitative research sample shows that one part of players think that the game is impossible to play without spending “massive” amounts of money. This way of perceiving the game is damaging for Top Eleven and can reflect in player’s perception of the game as unfair, which is critical for high-level competitive games.

Group 9: Frequency of Matches

A large group of people plays the Top Eleven game every day, it is a big world out there which makes it more difficult to understand the context in which all players play this game. Players can be children who go to school every day but also business people, understanding their daily routines, habits, and time constraints could help us design a better game environment for them and deliver better experiences.

Group 10: Lack of Control

Lack of control is found in various groups extracted from an affinity diagram structure, sense of being in control over the system/game goes from small usability parts way to the overall player perception of the game and engagement. Putting control in the hands of players should be a design principle and guideline for each part of the game experience.

Synthesis

The first research phase helped me address and map out the most important components of the Top Eleven player's experience. These components are presented separately, however they are not isolated but instead work together to create a wanted game experience. It was necessary for me to define them as separate groups in order to understand how they interact with each other.

What I've learned from this step is that players' goals to learn tactics, and strategy and improve their skills can sometimes be frustrating experiences. This is happening mostly because players don't know where they are wrong, and how can they improve their performance in the game. Players want to have control over their progress and over their learning. They are willing to spend huge amounts of time in the game, however without clear feedback of why are they failing (losing matches) combined with a lack of rewards their perception of the game can quickly turn 180 degrees.

Step 2 - 2nd Research Phase

Methodology: Survey (Reddit community) + Affinity Diagram

Survey Insights

Live Match

Live matches are the main point in the overall user flow, the level of excitement and the desire to compete are reaching their peak at this point.

Therefore, every goal or tense situation requires a realistic depiction and simulation of a real match. It is important to visually differentiate outcomes that occur during the match, so that they match the emotions and mood that the player feels at a given moment. Good examples would be celebrating a certain outcome such as a goal.

Daily Activities

This is the category that really showed the dedication and passion of Top Eleven players to the game, it also showed me the micro levels of engagement that the player practices on a daily basis and the doses of enjoyment that he usually gets in return, at this point I started seeing a repetition pattern whose role is crucial in keeping the player in the game as well as his return to it.

Training

After asking survey participants "Why did you visit the Top Eleven Game that day?" and "What were you trying to do?" I realized that the majority of visits were due to training. Training takes a big part of players' activities in the game and acts as a "return to game" trigger. Addressing the time spent on training your team and its position in the game flow helped me understand its importance in player engagement and the quality of the gaming experience of Top Eleven.

Rewards

In addition to what we already seen from the "Rewards" category (Research phase 1), in the second phase of research this category gets enriched with insight telling us engagement, by certain players, is perceived as insufficiently rewarded and that the impression that time invested in the game is not valued and rewarded enough.

Seeking Engagement

Although the daily activities of the players are most often recognized as satisfactory and engaging, a certain part of the research participants described the whole part of the flow as waiting for a live match, clearly emphasizing that they feel bored.

This category describes and signals the lack of challenges and excitement in daily activities, which further affects the very intrinsic motivation of the player.

Synthesis

The second phase of the research helped me to better understand parts of the game flow, as well as the critical points inside it.

Having in mind how important is for an F2P game to engage a player in small instances and make him feel motivated to stay in the game flow so that the game never seems too hard or too easy, but always contains a certain amount of challenge. I've decided to sketch the flow and target the features guided by the synthesized insights from both phases of research.

Step 3 - Define

Problem statement (Focus areas): The Top Eleven game was designed to achieve the engagement of millions of football fans in a realistic online football manager simulation. Although the game is very successful in that, I have observed that the Top Eleven does not meet its full engagement potential. This is causing ambiguity and frustration in some cases, which is affecting game flow and the pleasure of interacting with the game for a certain number of players.

User Flow

The first draft attempt of the user flow:

In the second draft, I added "Match Report" with all its sections/tabs, trying to see how it should fit into the flow diagram. At this point, I also addressed two streams and tried to iterate on them further:

Flow stream number one represents the negative outcome of the match, more precisely the lost match. What is important for this flow stream is that the player often feels as if he has lost the match unfairly, without clear feedback on why he lost, and even more importantly how he can improve and avoid such an outcome in the future. The lack of such signals leads him to frustration, this is the main reason why I have targeted that part (Match Report) of the flow and will try to suggest improvement further in the task:

Flow stream number two represents the opposite user experience from the one described in the first flow. The focus area of this flow is the act of scoring a goal, and everything revolves around celebration. Although the player can score a goal and eventually lose the match, this second flow seemed more appropriate for me to show addressed pain points:

User Stories

• As a player, if I lose, I want to understand why I lost so that I can come back to it and get better at it.

A potential solution to this problem could be to put the "Assistant" section, from the "Overview" tab in Match Report, in focus, as well as just directing players to specific drills and sections of the team that need additional training. However since this problem has a lower priority compared to other user stories, I decided not to address it in this task solution.

• As a player, if I win a match or score a goal, I want my club to celebrate that outcome.

The problem from the second user story is something that is more related to micro animations and motion graphics and does not require so much UX thinking. I think it's an important part of the gaming experience but decided that this story is also a lower priority compared to others.

• As a player, I want to have more challenges in daily activities so that I don't feel like waiting for matches to come.

The third story describes a problem that relates to a large part of the gaming experience, and it is found in both of the flow streams we discussed above. In addition, this part is crucial for F2P games, so I decided to continue the process by focusing exclusively on the problem defined in this story, more precisely on the Training feature and making it more engaging.

Step 4 - Design

“We have top players and, sorry if I’m arrogant, we have a top manager.”

- José Mourinho

Intensive Training

Top players and top managers require top training to become top competitors.

The concept of intensive training has one key component and that is time. It behaves as an interval reward, which means it is based on time. It must not have a clear schedule and should be "random".

A combination of a time component, a game mechanism that the user sees as a challenge, and the rewards he receives when engaging with this type of training, results in more frequent player visits to the game.

Putting in front of the player a performance-contingent task results in rewards that have meaning and intrinsically motivate the player. It is crucial to balance well the reward and the challenge that is set in front of the player and reward the player time and effort accordingly.

The key thing and the main goal of this solution is making player's perception of daily activities such as training interesting and challenging on the one hand, and on the other focused attention during activity that affects and enhances game flow.

The player as before has to choose the drill and the players he wants to train.

After selection, the player can start the training.

Interval Reward

The player can always skip intensive training if he wants.

The countdown begins and the player has enough time to read the explanation message before the challenge starts.

Tap Point

Given that players are already accustomed (Mental Model) to the animations that follow after selecting drills and players they want to train, I iterated on a potential solution that would increase engagement and the enjoyment of the training itself. Built from the already existing components that players go through when they train their teams, I’ve added tap points which will be called key points. The idea is to tap the screen when the animated loading line hits the key point, make a perfect tap, and get rewarded for engaging with a task.

This image displays slots on which the system can set a certain number of key points.

Key Point (different states)

• Every time the player taps the screen should be accompanied by a whistle sound.

• Every time the player taps and hits a key point it should be accompanied by a sound that would signal a positive outcome.

If the player connects 2 key points (regardless of which slot they are from) he gets + 10% and for each subsequent one in a row + 5%.

Conclusion

Even though I didn't make it to the second-to-last step in the selection process, working on this task was a one-of-a-kind experience for me. Having limited (almost no) access to data made me think creatively during the research phase. While I believe this enhancement has potential for success, testing it with players and measuring different engagement metrics from the gaming is necessary to decide if it's worth fully implementing into the system.