In my previous articles about game payment, I have mentioned the differences in the behaviors of gamers when it comes to purchasing game items. It was interesting to have an opportunity to redesign a long history payment gateway, which improves many important metrics, such as conversion rate, transaction per session, bounce rate, and many more.
Business scenario
In mid-2018, the game payment gateway faced many serious problems, including branding, trust, and usability. To define the problems, we have interviewed Game Operators, Gamers, Customer Services, and Stakeholders and collected data from Google Analytics.
Stakeholders
- There is no top-of-mind website for users to remember.
- Too many scam sites badly violated business reputation.
- The site is not flexible enough for the fast-paced, changing game industry.
- The site is not suitable for the company’s long-term goals: Become one of our flagship products, providing a game payment solution for the Vietnamese market and worldwide.
- Optimize the operation cost, increase margin profit
User
- I can’t find the thing that I need.
- The site is not optimal for mobile.
- Not confident when purchasing because there are too many fake sites.
- Spend 1,5 mins on-site and get lost
- The payment Ux is not consistent across games.
- The site doesn’t provide feedback and instruction.
Team
- Easy to customize
- Want to take less time for maintaining and expanding
- Need tracking & data analysis for future optimization
- Clear guidance and documents for future handling
Game Studio
- The site is not optimal for SEO
- High drop rate, but they don’t know why
- Want to customize their site.
- Branding
- Want to promote & run campaigns easily
- Want to be more proactive on their own projects
- Optimize the operation cost, increase margin profit
Target users
Define the product target users. There are two groups:
The Game Studio: Who sells their game item, operating and promoting their product via our site.
The Gamers: who buys game items.
According to the data collected from Google Analytics and our operation database, our Gamers are aged from 16 to 44, most paying users range from 20 to 35 years old. Their gender balance in the % of males and females. They have a modern lifestyle, love to travel and play sport.
Based on their purchase power and frequency, we divided them into 3 personas and created an empathy map to understand the big picture:
The Farmer
The Casual user
The Vip & Super Vip user
(Sorry, it’s not allowed to share the information in detail)
Competitor research
We also research our competitors’ payment gateway in the same market: Gamota, VTC, Garena to see how they structure, design, and manage the payment flow.
Approach & Solution
Based on our understanding of the business goals, market, user and competitors, we come up with an approach and solution for the site:
Designing at scale: At the moment, VNG has up to 70 games, and the number is still increasing. The Web Payment (WP) is using by over 500k users with different contexts and levels of access. Designing at scale means we need to think about a suitable solution for a wide range of games and users, not only for the current products but also for upcoming ones.
Designing for better performance: How might we design a payment gateway that helps Game Studios move faster? The website is expected to maximize the working performance of the team, be more responsive in launching, changing, and maintaining. In addition, we provide an admin tool for Game Studio teams to edit/add/remove things such as photos, campaign timing (on & off), content, icon, or event some specific flows.
Design for the Future: The new site should be flexible enough to adapt to future business requirements/changes. First and foremost, it should be designed with the mobile-first mindset to survive in the digital age when 90% of Vietnamese have a smartphone.
We decide to manage design based on components. This approach will help the team be more flexible in adding/removing features while keeping a consistent look and feel across pages as the project scales up.
Support data-centric mindset: We collect data from GA, Hotjar, adding tracking events to support our business and future design decisions. We build a tool that collected all data both in-game and on-site. It works as a diagnostic service to provide reports, suggestions, and predictions for Game Studios in the long term.
Results
So happy that the feedback from users was very positive, with 74% of 6000 visitors say that it’s easier to use to compare with the old version (tracked with Hotjar survey).
Some of the numbers that improved significantly also include:
- +0.91 transactions/PU/month,
- +0.89 Transactions/session,
- -60% Bounce rate
- +17% conversion rate.
