Merging Game Mechanics + Social Interactions
Product: The Swift Life
Platform: Mobile Game
When analyzing data from your game or app, it’s important to remember that the numbers alone won’t give you an accurate understanding of the behaviour patterns of your player base. Working on The Swift Life really showed me how true this statement was.
The Swift Life was a social media app for Taylor Swift and her fans. Similar to Instagram, players could create posts for other fans to engage with. The ultimate goal was that Taylor herself would interact with your post.
The gaming aspect of this social network was simple, collect as many Taymoji (Taylor Swift themed emojis) as possible and then spend your Taymoji in order to earn more Taymoji.
Players earned Taymoji in a number of ways, including daily login rewards and IAP packs.
However, the simplest and most common way to earn Taymoji was by liking social posts made by other players.
When a player liked another player’s post, they’d be awarded with a common Taymoji. Players could also use Taymoji as a form of emote on a post which awarded them with a more rare Taymoji.
The more rare Taymoji your social post earned, the closer you got to engaging with Taylor herself.
Likes per user
What the numbers told us
The Swift Life Daily Active Users (DAU) averaged a whopping 94 likes day.
In comparison, Instagram DAU averaged 8.4 likes per day, and Facebook DAU averaged 4.2 likes per day.
The earning of Taymojii via likes really motivated players to engage with posts.
What we actually noticed
However, we learned that this activity wasn’t necessarily a reflection of genuine social engagement. It was part of the grind to blindly like posts in order to get Taymoji. Players openly admitted to liking all posts they came across, no matter if the content was good or not.
Posts per day
What the numbers told us
Another “positive” trend we saw was that players were creating more Posts Per Day (PPD) on The Swift Life than other social networks at the time.
The Swift Life Players average 5.2 Posts Per Day (PPD). In comparison, Facebook users averaged 3.1 PPD, Twitter users average 0.31 PPD and Instagram users averaged 0.2 PPD likes per day.
What we actually noticed
On the surface these numbers look great, however, because we were incentivizing likes, players were creating “Taymoji farming posts,” posts created with the sole purpose of giving followers a post to like and to get Taymoji from. The timeline experience became littered with low quality and monotonous content.
Number of friends
What the numbers told us
Directly incentivizing social connections through the game play loop led players to connect with a larger than average number of people.
A Swift Life Player averaged up to 1249 friends. In comparison, Twitter users averaged 707 friends and Facebook users averaged 338 friends.
What we actually noticed
However, we found out through conversations in the app that the increased number of friends was less about making real connections and more about gaining access to more posts to mine for Taymoji.
Time spent in app
What the numbers told us
So players were spending A LOT of time in our game, farming Taymoji and creating posts (some good, but most junk).
The Swift Life players spent an average of 47 minutes per session (MSP). In comparison, Facebook users were in app for about 35 MPS, Instagram users average 15 MPS and Twitter users at the time were in the app for only 5 MPS.
What we actually noticed
However, we found out through conversations in the app that the increased number of friends was less about making real connections and more about gaining access to more posts to mine for Taymoji.
Conclusion
I might have painted a gloomy picture of The Swift Life, but really it wasn’t all that bad.
The app (or was it a game?) was successful in hitting the engagement goals it set out to achieve - Bring all Swifties into one online platform where they could interact with each other, and where Taylor and her team could engage with them. And although a lot of the content ultimately ended up just being gamified junk, there were so many awesome and creative posts made by the fan base in hopes of getting Taylor’s attention.
When all was said and done, The Swift Life gave me a lot of new UX challenges to tackle and was an excellent deep dive into the user experience quirks of a social network.