The ongoing flash-to-html conversion of Neopets, a pet-world website from the late 90s, causes an increased risk of losing potential and existing user engagement. Seasoned users resort to bookmarking pages and using off-site resources to effectively accomplish their goals.
Independent from the Neopets company, I spent 8 weeks developing a research report, followed by 8 weeks designing a solution for Neopets website users. I gained support, feedback, and insights from mentors and existing Neopets users, which heavily informed the final app solution.
Neopets became a safe haven for many children who still engage with the website today, and communicating with other users to quickly locate items, trade, and more is an important aspect of this pet-world experience. With the NeoChat application, avid Neopets users can more easily stay on top of site-related notifications, track their goals, and easily access interactions with other users.
Neopets became a safe haven for many children who still engage with the website today, and communicating with other users to quickly locate items, trade, and more is an important aspect of this pet-world experience. With the NeoChat application, avid Neopets users can more easily stay on top of site-related notifications, track their goals, and easily access interactions with other users.
After conducting a competitive analysis and sending out a survey, I rewrote my research plan, interview guide, screener survey, and interview script. Receiving nearly 40 responses, I quickly discovered that my initial assumptions about the user and method of screening with them were inaccurate, leading to unclear statistical results. Here are user findings and insights I learned from my research about the users and their behaviors:
To gain a deeper understanding of the main problems the different Neopets users faced, I conducted 11 user interviews following a second survey that received 52 responses. The following are the key insights I gained after affinity mapping and synthesizing user findings to derive key insights that would guide the solution direction:
To gain a deeper understanding of the main problems the different Neopets users faced, I conducted 11 user interviews following a second survey that received 52 responses. The following are the key insights I gained after affinity mapping and synthesizing user findings to derive key insights that would guide the solution direction:
Users faced difficulties while navigating the Neopets website, and some pages contain disabled activities or events. Common user concerns and usage patterns indicated that Neopets is losing potential and existing user engagement. Having access to communication features on a mobile application would allow users to readily stay connected with Neopets, and supports efforts made to user engagement.
This proposed app solution would not seek to replace, but support, the current Neopets website that is under conversion to an HTML, mobile-friendly version. This solution aims to increase the user engagement by 3% which would also positively impact user retention and related statistics.
In addition to feedback from peers and mentors while sketching and wireframing, I highly valued the feedback I could receive from conducting usability testing based on my high-fidelity prototype. The following list are some of my main findings:
This application possesses a lot of promise for both its users and for the Neopets franchise, with an overwhelming positive participant response from its user base. A few of the participants mentioned they would have appreciated if the entire website was built out in the mobile app design, but this wasn’t possible within this project scope.
“I had an excellent experience with the activity and found everything very easy to understand. Chantal was helpful, kind, and very professional.”
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