Teague Nelson

UX Leadership & Design

Client

Austin Eastciders

My Role

Project Concepting
UX Design

Summary

A mobile game distributed through social media and played in the browser. Designed to promote four different flavors fo hard cider.

Visit the Austin Eastciders Website

PROBLEM STATEMENT

Austin Eastciders is a hard cider beverage company in Austin, TX.

They wanted to produce something simple but fun that would be interactive on a mobile device to centerpiece a social media campaign and promote four new flavors of cider they were introducing.

APPROACH

Assessing The Context of the Project

Assessing The Market Audience & Brand Feel

Story Planning

Game Concepting

Screen Level Design Ideation

Wireframes & Prototyping

Marketing / Social Covers

To Code

Previous Work & Project Context

A REPEAT CLIENT

The context to this project is that the agency I was working at, Barrel NY, had designed their online store and website.

I had worked on the wireframes of their website, Austineastciders.com, so when it came time to design and produce a marketing campaign for their new cider they came back and re-engaged the agency.

Assessing The Market Audience
& Brand Feel

MEETING AUDIENCE WHERE THEY ARE

The marketing of Austin Eastciders is built around conveying a fun, social, summertime feeling.

We were very familiar with the brand after designing their website and online store, but when thinking about what kind of campaign we could run we began with re-examining the audience we would be targeting.

It was by kicking around ideas of what would appeal to the audience that we landed on the idea to produce a simple, interactive mobile game that could be easily promoted through a social media campaign.

Story Planning

ELEMENTS OF STORY PLANNING

The centerpiece of the story, and why we were doing a campaign was to introduce the four new flavors of cider Austin Eastciders were releasing.

We also knew both because of resource constraints, and for the sake of keeping the audience attention, that we needed to keep the concept and story of the game simple and not too complex to play.

To introduce the four new flavors we landed on the idea of creating a ‘cider tap’ where to play, people would need to help ‘create’ the new ciders by interacting with the four new flavor ingredients on the screen.

Game Concepting

FLOW DIAGRAM & NARRATIVE MAPPING

With the general idea of the game in place that the user would need to interact with the ingredients to help ‘create’ the new ciders, the next stage was to figure out the mechanisms of how users would actually create the cider, and the challenges that would confront them.

We sketched different ideas and landed on an idea where the ingredients would float around the screen and the user would need to ‘tap’ on them to crush them into cider.

This fit multiple levels of what we were trying to accomplish – a coherant storyline, the depth of commitment by a user would not be too high, and the gameplay difficulty could be adjusted based on the speed of the ingredients floating around the screen that the user would need to tap.

Screen Level Design Ideation

SCREEN CONCEPTS

Now with the concept more defined, we began designing loose screen level concepts to fill in how the game might look.

We wire framed the screens between the levels, and worked out how to feature all the four new flavors in a sequence of levels that would increase in difficulty.

Prototyping

PROTOTYPING THE HAPPY-PATH

From the wireframes, we worked with the visual designer and the existing Austin Eastciders brand elements to develop a simple prototype of how the game would look, function, and behave.

The prototype was built quickly and only designed around a single happy-path.

The purpose of prototyping this was was to make sure we captured key elements of the game narrative, got the behaviors of the interactive elements right, and also were able to discuss and get good feedback from all project stakeholders.

Handoff &
Marketing / Social Covers

TEASING INTEREST IN THE GAME

After designing the game flow and screens, we handed the designs to an external developer, and consulted when needed as they built it out.

While the game was being developed, we also worked on a series of social posts for Austin Eastciders to get the word out, reach their audience, and promote the final product.

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