Pokemon Go Feature Redesign
Overview
Pokemon Go is a mobile game by Niantic that released and boomed in popularity in July 2016. In this game, players can catch and trade Pokemon, participate in raids, complete quests, send gifts to each other.
Context
I love playing Pokemon Go. It’s the game that caused “world peace” in the first few weeks of its release. Although I love the game, I can’t help but get frustrated with some of the design choices made. One of which is how the gift-giving system is set up.
Skills
User Interface Design
User Experience Design
Prototyping
Timeline
February 2020
Tools
Figma
Research
I gave a poll to my local Pokemon Go Discord chat asking them what they valued out of QoL (Quality of Life) improvements, new Pokemon, more features. A vast majority of them valued QoL (Quality of Life) improvements much higher than new content. One of the most complained about features on the Discord server and on Reddit forums is gift giving. You’re able to send gifts that you acquire while walking to friends, giving them items and increasing your friendship level. Higher friendship levels offer perks such as decreased trading costs and more experience. However, the way this gift-giving system is implemented is frustrating for a variety of reasons. I decided to focus this project on the gift-giving and receiving features of Pokemon Go.
The Problem
Receiving
If you receive a gift, a gift icon appears next to the friend that sent you the gift along with a message that says “X sent you a Gift!”. If you want to open this gift, you have to tap on their profile, tap again to display the gift name, tap again to open the gift, wait for animations, tap through the items you receive, wait for more animations displaying your increased friendship level, then tap again to exit the trainer page. It can get very time-consuming to open many gifts.
Sending
The main problem with sending gifts is that you can’t see whether or not one of your friends has opened your gift (and is ready to receive another one) from the main page. The only way to know this is by visiting their trainer page and seeing that the send gift icon is grayed out. Further, because you have to visit their trainer page to send them a gift, it can also get time-consuming to visit the trainer pages of all of the friends you want to send gifts to.
Sketches
I drew out some sketches of a redesigned gift-sending/receiving system on the friends list screen. This design allows users to open and send gifts from the friends list, rather than individual trainer pages. A notable plus of this design is that users can now see if the gifts they sent have been opened, indicating whether or not another gift can be sent. These changes make the whole process of opening and sending gifts much quicker and more convenient.
I also created some user flow trees for gift opening and sending, comparing the current design to the proposed design. This make it easy to see that the new design cuts the number of actions a user has to go through by half.
Wireframing
This is a high-fidelity wireframe made following the sketches I drew. I followed Pokemon Go’s branding and color-scheme for these designs, ensuring that they look natural; This also made it easier to imagine the design in context of the game, and focus my attentions to how the experience felt.
There were still some problems with this design, mainly concerning the UI. When you receive a gift, the gift icon appears along with the “Open Gift” button. When there are no gifts, other information occupies the space. However, the send/sent button is always present. It repeats for every friend on the friends list, making for bad UI design.
Other issues included the process of sending gifts to each friend, while being much easier than before, still being a little inconvenient; there’s no way to mass send gifts.
This meant I had to rethink the send gift system to make for a more intuitive experience.
Final Design
The final design incorporates a changed sending system. Instead of having repeated send gift buttons for everyone on the friends list, there is now a send gift button that allows users to send gifts to multiple friends at a time. Friends who are ready to receive gifts will automatically appear at the top of the list, and the number of remaining gifts is shown at the top left. Ultimately, this design makes it even easier for users to send gifts to their friends while also boasting a cleaner UI than the previous design.
While there are definitely things that could be improved on the friends list itself, such as customizable categories, I feel as though I definitely improved how gift-sending works in the game. With changes like these, players won’t have to get frustrated with how long it takes to open all of their friends’ gifts and give gifts in return.
This side project helped me learn more about the importance of understanding and exploring the needs of a user base. Some complaints about Pokemon Go I found through research surprised me; for example, many people desired a “Ready” button for raids, something I didn’t even consider because I don’t raid often.
In the future, I want to tackle a project that has me interact with a team, balancing everyone’s opinions to come to decisions.