EVE echoes onboarding learnability

2024

VALUE PROPOSITION

  • Lower than expected acquisition from suspects and retention from leads in this mobile free-to-play (F2P) massive multiplayer online (MMO) game resulted in the need to analyze onboarding learnability

METHOD

  • Expert review

IMPACT

  • Expected impact of increase in acquisition and retention due to less cognitive overload and shorter (contextual) tutorial

  • Gaming analytics register top-performing titles with Day 1 retention rate of 40%, 15% for Day 7 and 6.5% for Day 28. The Return on Investment (ROI) should increase the conversion of new users, especially on D1, which is when the most dropouts occur

  • In F2P, players’ conversion drops significantly if the first time user experience (FTUE) does not match the players’ expectations within the first few minutes of gameplay

EXPERT REVIEW METHODOLOGY

  • Playability Heuristics (Korhonen, 2016)

  • Severity rating (Nielsen Norman Group)

  • Gameplay flowchart

  • Onboarding plan

  • Rational game design

Heuristics, issues and severity ratings

The gameplay flowchart and onboarding plan were used for an overview of the gameplay flow of the onboarding, and for a structurized list of features and/or systems in which it was verified that:

  • Most onboarding was done by contextual tutorial text or learning by doing

  • The level of challenge demanded of the player at each given step

  • Some elements were not taught to the player, allowing to elaborate the ‘suggestions’ in the communication to the PROD team

PRESENTATION OF TOP FINDINGS

Rational game design used to structure information by pillars, game systems, mechanics, skills/actions and atomic parameters to help validate the design intention

Onboarding plan

STUDY GOALS

  • Analysis of FTUE through chapters 1 and 2

    • What are the usability issues identified in EVE Echoes’ onboarding?

    • What are the guidelines for solving them?