Zynga Poker

Hand Clarity Case Study

Role
Principal Designer

Team
1 PM, 1 engineer, 1 designer

Responsibility
Visual Exploration, Asset creation, Implementation

The Challenge

Players are claiming that they had the winning hand but still lost to another player.

They are calling Zynga support and requesting compensation for lost chips and in frustration leaving 1-star review on the app store, claiming Zynga Poker is a fraud and is rigged. Lower star ratings adversely reduce the number of new installs.

Key Metrics

  • Appstore ranking

  • Qualitative reviews

  • Customer service calls

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ISSUES

Timing is too quick

The duration in between rounds is too quick for players to confirm the winning hand.

Lack of sidepot knowledge

Sidepots and its payout are difficult to understand and is a challenge to represent clearly.

Lack of Hands knowledge

Some players just simply aren’t familiar with the deciding factor when players have the same cards.

IDEATION

Ideas were quickly circulated amongst the team and we’ve narrowed down the quickest and most viable options we can take action on right away.

Increase time duration between hands

Readjust the winner hole cards so they’re more visible 

Add indicators for sidepots payout clearly

Dim irrelevant community cards

Add more visual indicators to the winning hand

Animated Reveal

The hypothesis is that if players can’t see the winning hands clearly, this animated reveal approach will direct their eye movement to the center of the screen where the winning hands are the foreground focus.

This approach will increase the duration between hands.

PIECING IT TOGETHER

Putting it all together, we have tweaked all the components that we can, but it’s still not concise enough.

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BEFORE & AFTER

Hole cards are straighten to improve visibility. Border glow is added to the winning card. Irrelevant card is dimmed.

Community Cards now dims irrelevant cards. Border glow is added to the winning cards.

Winning Banner visuals is more decorated and pop out more from background.

NEW ADDITION

Introducing Kicker Card to educate players on card rankings

When two players have the same hand, the deciding factor becomes who has the next highest hole card.

REFLECTION

  • Changes were quickly rolled out and development time were quick due to mostly just visual changes

  • App store reviews no longer mention traces of incorrect hands being awarded

  • We originally wanted to make the duration between hands longer, but it’ll introduce way too many technical complexity

  • It’s difficult to attribute this update to any meaningful boost to business metrics, due to other concurrently running experiments

RESULTS

  • Appstore rating increased back to 4.6 star

  • There's minimal comments on incorrect hands being awarded

  • Chips refund request Customer Calls reduced by 10%