Play League of Legends to win cash and prizes daily!

Challenge of the Day

OVERVIEW
Problem

Our original V1 metagame platform was for users to create and host their own challenges with customized objectives to play with their community in League of Legends, and Rainmaker took a cut of the winnings. However, to be profitable, one of the areas we had to improve was our user retention and lifetime value (LTV). Our analytics and user research identified two main problems as to why these numbers were low:

  • Most users were more interested in participating in objectives rather than creating, which led to few available challenges to join.

  • Week-long challenges’ leaderboards remained stagnant after 3 days, which led to participants to “give up” midway through the week.

Solution

Update the existing platform to a new V2, “Challenge of the Day”, hosted by Rainmaker where a user only needs to join and then play League. We hosted two per day: one to win in-game currency and the other to win cash prizes. In the end, this improved our N-day retention by 95% for Day 7 and 160% for Day 30! Users paid entry fees to join cash challenges more often, boosting LTV and revenue!

Team

Michael Cho

Senior Product Designer

Alex Daniels

Lead Designer

Joe Brottman

CCO

Jonathan Kennell

CTO

Jim Matheson

Lead Software Engineer

Julia Collins

Software Engineer

Scope

Mobile responsive web app

Timeline

1 month (MVP) + 3 months (Iterations)

Tools

Figma, Linear, Mobbin

My Contribution

As the Senior Product Designer on the team, I conducted a competitive analysis on similar products in the market, redesigned old user flows, created new design system components, transitioned most of the design system's colors, and iterated designs based on initial feedback from users.

Enter a Challenge
Enter to win Rain Coins (RC) or Cash

Play free challenges to earn RC. Users pay in RC to enter paid challenges to win cash prizes.

Play Your League Match
Check your results

As long as you stay in the top 50%, you’ll earn your money back or better!

Win Prizes Daily!
Earn winnings through paid challenges

Use them to join more challenges or transfer to your PayPal account.

Our Process
Research
Brainstorm
Mockups
Development + QA
Iterate
DESIGN
Research

Jon, our CTO, created custom analytics dashboards that tracked KPI’s for our V1 challenges platform. We partnered with college gaming clubs to test the product, and I created some company-wide challenges to participate in. Two weeks in, we identified areas to improve as we used the product ourselves, observed user behavior, and gathered feedback through Discord. N-day retention was at 53% for day 1 but dropped off to 18% by day 7.


Day 1 - 53%
Day 7 - 18%
Day 30 - 5%

N-Day Retention
Brainstorm

Based on our testing and feedback of V1, we collectively agreed we needed to cater toward users joining challenges rather than creating them and to promote shorter challenges to keep the objectives fresh. Our brainstorming led to the idea, “Challenge of the Day.” Rainmaker would host two daily challenges users could join. Now the focus was to just join, and unique challenges were always available.

Alex's Brainstorm Summary

Mockups

I researched different apps that had similar flows and components to the concepts we had brainstormed. I used Mobbin to paste in flows of apps like Public, and I took screenshots of UI from League of Legends and Sleeper for inspiration. Then I designed multiple approaches to change our current V1. After receiving feedback from the team, I made a few adjustments to the new key flows and components.

Flows from Sleeper, Coinbase, and Public

More UI from Sleeper and League of Legends

New Components

Sample Payment Flow

New Card Layout Exploration

Development + QA

Jim and Julia, our engineers, were able to quickly implement a working build in as short as two weeks! Alex, Jon, and I QA’d the site on staging for larger bugs to report while also participating in challenges every day.

Sample of One of My Linear Tickets

QA Slack Thread

My QA Tickets

Iterate

As we tested and reported bugs, I proposed UX adjustments by updating the team’s designs to quickly address some areas that could be improved before launch.

Old Challenge Cards

New

Old Buy-with-RAIN Checkout Flow

New

Added a New Rain Coin Explainer Modal

launch
Initial Launch of Challenge of the Day

After making final fixes and some adjustments to the design, we successfully released Challenge of the Day to the public! Joe, our Chief Creative Officer, created this fun outreach graphic for our new version.

Tracking Success

Looking at our engagement analytics, we saw our number of Daily/Monthly Active Users improve. More importantly, our N-day retention for Challenge of the Day (V2) was much higher than our V1 numbers. Notably, Day 7 saw an increase of 95% and Day 30 saw an increase of 160%!
Users came back to our site more often to join and play cash challenges, leading to paying more entry fees. LTV and revenue was up!

Day 1 - 60%
Day 7 - 35%
Day 30 - 13%

N-Day Retention
More Iterations

Based on initial feedback from users, we made quick updates to improve the user experience. We prioritized showing the objective to be above the leaderboard, and we changed viewing users’ game stats from expand/collapse to a drawer.

Old Challenge Details

New

Old User's Game Details

New

Tradeoffs and Possible Improvements
Marketing vs Product Design

Joe, Our CCO, had made a great marketing page for Challenge of the Day using new brand colors, purple and pink, but they didn’t align with the current platform’s blue we used at the time. Knowing we all wanted to rebrand soon anyways, we decided to launch with the different colors and progressively update our platform to match the new branding.

RAIN Tokens vs Rain Coins

Since Rainmaker became more focused on gaming than cryptocurrency, we still needed to include ways to incorporate our RAIN token. It further complicated the introduction of Rain Coins, which would be the new in-game currency of Challenge of the Day. We needed to create more detailed explainers and tutorials for a clear distinction.

Time Constraint

As a startup with limited runway, we needed to ship and iterate quickly. Ideally, I’d want more time to validate some design decisions through user testing before committing to development, but at least we were able to test by naturally using the product ourselves. Since our team iterated so quickly, we could at least gather data through our past versions to help inform us as well.

conclusion
Final Thoughts

I was continuously amazed at how much we were able to get done in such a short timeline. In only a month, we designed, implemented, and launched a fun V2 product thanks to an amazing team. It was also very rewarding to see analytics improve over V1, and we created additional game-modes like Teams to add cooperative play and variety.

Unfortunately, we had to pivot away from Challenges due to high user acquisition cost. Our free challenges and referral program paid out too much free RC, so users felt no need to buy more to pay entry fees. Players also bought lower-ranked League of Legends accounts to play against beginners to inflate their scores, which frustrated other users, who eventually left the platform. We attempted to address these issues, but it became clear that we needed to change the product and business model while still utilizing learnings from Challenge of the Day. So, we created Poro Survivor!

Figma Mocks + Live Site

Take a look through the actual file! Things can get pretty messy as always. You can also check out the current site online here.