Zynga Poker Multi-platform UX

Zynga Poker is one of Zynga’s oldest and most popular franchise games. While being highly successful from the start, the game lacked an identity, allowing competitor poker games to copy its successes. With a redesigned focus on mobile, it reclaimed its top spot in the poker category in last eight years.

Challenge
In 2010, while the Zynga Poker Facebook web game was growing by leaps and bounds, its mobile counterpart was underperforming but had lots of potential due to a shared user base of 4M Facebook web players. It suffered from poor navigation, cluttered interface, and could not scale for growth. Around this time, web game teams and mobile game teams were separated so the two platforms did not share visual parity.

My role as Lead UX Designer was to design a great experience for a poker player who wanted to quickly play for 10 minutes on their mobile device. Questions going into the process were abundant. How many taps does it take to get to a poker table? Is it easy to find the right stakes for the player’s bankroll? What would increase the play session time for a player? What web game components translate well into a mobile game? How do we create a user interface with lots of room to grow?

Approach
The process started with deconstructing all features, prioritizing core user actions, and organizing them in intuitive navigation. The next step was to create high-fidelity wireframes and quick prototypes using click-through PDFs to test on the device. With rapid prototyping, we were able to troubleshoot and prevent any snags in the user flows.

The basic premise of the design was to have the player get into a game within one or two taps without the complexity of learning about the stakes or poker game types. Working with game design, we created the now-ubiquitous “PLAY NOW” button which takes the player into a game with a low-stakes table with one tap.

Visual Style

With the visual style, I pivoted away from the Facebook game and create a luxurious lounge feel that would feel more welcoming and warm than what was offered in the poker game space. Along with a junior designer, I created a toolkit to insure that art assets could be 9-slice scaled to all resolutions, regardless of platform or device. The James Bond film “Casino Royale” was in theaters at this time, and I could not help but imagine what kind of game would James Bond want to play. The visual references to the famous movie titles are obvious. Indulging in the vernacular of poker, I was inspired by using hearts, spades, clubs, and diamonds to start our visual playground.

I led a creative brainstorming session where the design team conducted visual research on how luxury poker could manifest in persons, places, and objects. We wanted the poker game to feel like cozying up to your best friend on a nice couch over glasses of Scotch.

Once the new design was launched in September 2011, it took one year for the game to grow from 250,000 to 1M players. Subsequently Zynga Poker web and mobile merged, and my UX team grew from 3 people to 12 people designing new features to keep Zynga Poker as one of Zynga’s franchise games.

Outcomes since launch:

Top Grossing
For two consecutive years, it was in the Top 10 grossing game in the App Store and Google Play and continues to be a high grossing franchise game in the Zynga portfolio.

Dominance of the Poker Market
The game captured 61% of the online Poker market and inspired several ' copycat’ games since launch.

+4 Stars in App Store
Consistently rated 4+ stars in both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.