Determining factors for user engagement, for a mobile application based on IGDB’s services The Process of Designing, Building, and Deploying an Android news application for gamers powered by IGDB.com Master’s thesis in Interaction Design and Technologies Filip Husnjak Emil Åhsberg Department of Applied IT CHALMERS UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY Gothenburg, Sweden 2017 Master’s thesis 2017:08 Determining factors for user engagement for a mobile application based on IGDB services The Process of Designing, Building, and Deploying an Android news application for gamers powered by IGDB.com Filip Husnjak Emil Åsberg Department of Applied IT Division of Interaction Design Chalmers University of Technology Gothenburg, Sweden 2017 Determining factors for user engagement, for a mobile application based on IGDB services The Process of Designing, Building, and Deploying an Android news application for gamers powered by IGDB.com Filip Husnjak Emil Åsberg © FILIP HUSNJAK & EMIL ÅSBERG, 2017. Supervisor: Fang Cheng, Department of Computer Science and Engineering Supervisor: Christian Frithiof, IGDB.com, 8 Dudes in a Garage AB Examiner: Staffan Björk, Department of Computer Science and Engineering Master’s Thesis 2017:08 Department of Applied IT Division of Interaction Design Chalmers University of Technology SE-412 96 Gothenburg Telephone +46 31 772 1000 Cover: Images from the Google Play Store, Game News - powered by IGDB Typeset in LATEX Gothenburg, Sweden 2017 iv Determining factors for user engagement, for a mobile application based on IGDB services The Process of Designing, Building, and Deploying an Android news application for gamers powered by IGDB.com FILIP HUSNJAK EMIL ÅSBERG Department of Applied IT Chalmers University of Technology Abstract IGDB.com is a gaming website containing game related information for over 35000 games. With their API for the database they would now like to expand their ser- vice’s reach through a mobile application. The application needs to engage IGDB’s users, called gamers, to gain high downloads and active use. To find these factors and create an application that their users will use, by using several methods such as; Questionnaires, a Blue Ocean Strategy method called Strategy Canvas, Proto- typing and user testing. The findings from the questionnaire states that the most sought after feature for a mobile application is access to the database, searching for game information, where the News and Social features came after. The created application became a Game news application where the user can search for games read information and news. Concluding the thesis, we found that through the use of these methods and the mobile platform we have managed to find interesting factors. We believe that these factors are the cause for the higher user activity on the mobile application than on the website. Keywords: Android, Application, Mobile, Interaction Design, Retention, Onboard- ing, Material design, IGDB. v Acknowledgements We would like to extend our deepest gratitude to the IGDB team. To Christian Frithiof for letting us be a part of the development of the IGDB services and for always encouraging us. We also appreciate the technical expertise and advice we have received from Jake Catrall and Jonas Innala. As well as Sander Brauwers for sharing his insight on the design process. We would also like to thank our supervisor at Chalmers, Fang Chen, for lending us her expertise as well as helping us with the structure of this master thesis. Filip Husnjak and Emil Åsberg, Gothenburg, May 2017 vii Contents List of Figures xiii 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Background . 2 2 Theory 5 2.1 Literature Study . 5 2.2 Mobile interface Design . 6 2.2.1 Material Design . 6 2.3 User Retention and Onboarding . 6 2.4 Blue Ocean Strategy . 9 2.4.1 Red and Blue Oceans . 9 2.4.2 Value Innovation . 9 2.4.3 Strategy Canvas . 10 2.4.4 Four Actions . 11 2.4.5 Six Paths . 12 2.5 Agile Development . 12 2.6 Scrum . 13 2.6.1 Sprint Planning . 14 2.6.2 Daily Scrum . 14 2.6.3 Sprint Review . 15 2.6.4 Sprint Retrospective . 15 2.7 Ethics . 15 2.7.1 Anonymity & Confidentiality . 15 2.7.2 The Right to Withdraw Without Penalty . 16 2.7.3 Appropriate Incentive . 16 3 Methodology 17 3.1 User Research . 17 3.1.1 Survey . 17 3.1.2 Questionnaire . 18 3.1.3 Focus Group . 18 3.1.4 Statistical Significance . 18 3.2 Prototyping . 19 3.2.1 Low-fidelity prototypes . 19 3.2.2 High-fidelity prototypes . 20 ix Contents 3.3 Mobile Development . 20 3.4 Other Methods . 20 3.4.1 Interviews . 20 3.4.2 Personas . 21 4 Process 23 4.1 Previous User Research . 23 4.2 Questionnaire . 24 4.2.1 Survey Client . 25 4.2.2 Survey Summary and Analysis . 26 4.3 Analysis of previous personas . 28 4.4 Blue Ocean Analysis . 29 4.4.1 Strategy Canvas . 31 4.5 Prototyping . 32 4.5.1 Design choices . 32 4.5.2 Low-fidelity prototyping . 32 4.5.3 Bottom Navigation Vs. Navigation Drawer . 33 4.5.4 What information to present . 34 4.5.5 Medium-fidelity prototyping . 34 4.6 Second iteration of design . 36 4.6.1 High-fidelity prototype . 37 4.6.2 Prepare User Testing . 39 4.7 Third Iteration of the Design . 39 4.8 Implementation . 41 4.8.1 Code planning and preperations . 41 4.8.2 Creating the API wrapper . 41 4.8.3 Databinding . 43 4.8.4 Game Pages . 43 4.8.5 Loading images from URLs . 44 4.8.6 Search . 45 4.8.7 Caching . 45 4.9 Pivot . 46 4.9.1 New Application Design . 48 4.10 Deploying to Google Play Store . 50 5 Results 53 5.1 User Research - Questionnaire . 53 5.2 Blue Ocean Analysis . 54 5.3 Prototypes . 56 5.3.1 First iteration prototype . 56 5.3.2 Second iteration prototype . 57 5.3.3 Third iteration prototype . 58 5.4 Mobile Application . 59 5.4.1 Onboarding . 59 5.4.2 News Feed . 60 5.4.3 Article View . 62 5.4.4 Game Page . 63 x Contents 6 Discussion 65 6.1 Methods discussion . 65 6.2 Result Discussion . 67 6.2.1 Addictive software . 67 6.2.2 Market position . 68 6.2.3 Analytical results . 69 6.3 Research discussion . 69 6.4 Future Work . 71 7 Conclusion 75 Bibliography 77 A Appendix Questionnaire I B Appendix Survey Slides V C Appendix UML Diagram XV D Appendix MVP 1 Prototypes XVII E Appendix MVP 3 Prototypes XXI xi Contents xii List of Figures 2.1 Image from the dscout study displaying most attention-grabbing apps 7 2.2 The Hook Model . 7 2.3 Value Innovation . 9 2.4 Example of a Strategy Canvas from the Book: Blue Ocean Strategy . 10 2.5 Four Actions Framework . 11 3.1 Equation of the sample size . 19 4.1 Image from Surveymonkey illustrating ratings . 25 4.2 Image of the Hotjars messaging window on IGDB . 26 4.3 IGDB features vs requested App features . 27 4.4 Image of the Collector Persona . 29 4.5 The resulting Strategy Canvas after our comparison of Appy Gamer, IGDB, and Player.me . 32 4.6 Left: Bottom Navigation; Right: Navigation Drawer; Images from the Material Design guidelines . 33 4.7 Design of Social feed, Discover view, and Profile view . 35 4.8 Design prototype of Game page . 36 4.9 Design prototype of the Search view . 36 4.10 Design prototype of the second iteration Discover view and Game page 38 4.11 Design prototype of the second iteration profile page . 38 4.12 The new design of Game page and the Profile page . 40 4.13 In-App: Screenshot of the Discover view of the application . 42 4.14 In-App: All Game Page views from the application . 43 4.15 This image display’s the old design of the Social feed (Right) and the new design of the news feed (Left) . 48 4.16 This image display’s the onboarding process of the new concept which goes through Topics, Games, and Sources . 49 4.17 This image display’s the new concept’s article pages, without the text content . 50 4.18.