THE PROBLEM

Gaming is deeply social, but current games don't encourage offline interaction

THE SOLUTION

Grubquest is a web and mobile application that provides offline rewards in the form of local restaurant coupons for online gaming through daily and weekly challenges. Users log onto Grubquest, pick the challenges they want to complete, finish these challenges in-game (tracked using the video game's API), and have coupons sent to them.

In doing so, Grubquest achieves the following:

OVERVIEW

PHASE I: Discovery

I conducted over 40 customer discovery interviews with potential users and transcribed over 100 quotes from those interviews. Here were some of the quotes I found particularly powerful:

"When you spend time together in real life, you get closer to someone, so when you log on you're that much more pumped to be hanging with your friends"

"I don't go look for coupons. I don't cut coupons. I would [use them] if I had one. I just don't"

"I never eat alone"

I took the quotes I collected, sorted them, and created the affinity diagram below to identify key patterns and insights:

phase II: SOFT LAUNCH

The most interesting feedback you can get is always from live product. In the interest pursuing that, we locked down our first restaurant partner (shoutout to Hunter House Hamburgers) and did a 2-week soft launch. We put a few posts up on Facebook, but found most of our users from local gaming events. Over two weeks, we were able to sign on 80 active users. Of those 80 users, 12 of them went on to redeem the coupons they earned at Hunter House, as shown above. This was the feedback we got: 

Incorporating some of that feedback, I was able to pivot the designs from this:

To This:

In addition making the quests more accessible, we made it a point to continue the emphasis on the food and deals. From a UI standpoint, I added more communicative icons to the front of the card and incorporated the use of a cartoon-like NPC (non-player character) figure on the back of the card. In doing so, we wanted to provide the user with both more functionality, but also familiarity. Most of our users are familiar with card games where icons are located at the top of the card as well as with RPG-tropes where NPCs are common.
Lastly, we also moved the progress bars to the front of each quest card instead of the back so users could more readily view their progress. 

phase III: RE-LAUNCHING

In addition to making the challenges more accessible and expanding to more restaurants, the biggest part of our relaunch is that Grubquest is no longer going to be just a web application. In order to engage our user on a regular basis, it was necessary for us to expand to mobile. 

The Grubquest companion app was designed to facilitate and support the web application, not to replace it. Users still have to go onto their desktop devices to both view and accept new quests. The information density and number of challenges of quest interaction better lends itself to a web experience. Furthermore, because these challenges have to be completed on a desktop device in-game, it made sense to put quests on the device they were already on.

Instead, the companion app took on the function of being able to view quest progress and store a user's rewards. This makes it easier for users to track their progress and allows us to better track use of rewards. Perhaps most importantly, the companion app serves as a portal for engagement. Through the companion app, we are able to send notifications for when existing challenges are about to end, when their rewards are close to expiring, when they've completed a quest, and perhaps most crucially, when new quests have been put online.

Through this form of mobile engagement, we hope to connect with the user more regularly and start building more habitual behavior around all of Grubquest's interactions. 

We are currently testing the mobile app with our first wave of beta testers. I've attached an interaction map and some screenshots of iterations below:

Grubquest is very much a work in progress, but please do come check out the alpha at grubquest.gg!