Party Play

HypeHype is a social gaming and game making app where the content is created by players. The app worked, but it was largely a solo experience — and solo experiences are hard to retain.

I took the project on as both product owner and designer, which meant owning the vision and the alignment as much as the screens.

Using the app myself, I found many pain points in the friend-adding flow. Incorrectly labelled buttons, unclear feedback and cluttered UI were commonplace, adding unnecessary friction to features that otherwise worked.

The user-generated content also lacked social experiences. There were very few good multiplayer games on the platform, so even players who did connect had little reason to play together.

The goal ultimately became to improve retention by shifting the focus of the app towards social gaming with friends — pushing the limits of social play on the platform and getting people playing together as frictionlessly as possible.

To create those first connections, we landed on open parties: players are matchmade into parties with other relevant players, such as people from the same country or someone they had played with before. It gives a solo player a group to join rather than a list of strangers to befriend.

For the second initiative I took on the holistic friend-adding experience, mapping the pain points and then placing the right affordance at each point in the journey where finding, adding or keeping a friend actually mattered.

With developers eager to start, I created initial wireframes and concepts quickly, then iterated on them over the first few weeks while development ran in parallel. From there I moved the core screens into high-fidelity mockups, staying a step ahead of implementation so I never became the blocker.

Open parties were genuinely novel, so there were few best practices or guidelines to follow. That meant several rounds of iteration and player feedback before the feature both made sense to players and did what we intended it to do.

Even though some designs never saw the light of day, I was happy with how the project turned out and with my role in it.

The harder challenge was getting creators to follow the shift in focus. We faced a chicken-and-egg problem: we needed social games in order to test the social features, but creators weren't making them yet. We needed to lead by example with a variety of fun social games built in house, and that was lacking.

If I did it again I would have advocated for a stronger internal content roadmap much earlier. The UI improvements successfully reduced friction, but long-term retention relied on the content being fun. It reinforced my belief that UX does not stop at the interface — it extends into content strategy and the health of the community ecosystem.