MARKKIT KNOWSY

A mobile game using simple behaviors and a viral hook to drive social sharing

 

Overview

On the Markkit app, an active community of over 100,000 style and beauty enthusiasts, aged 14–34, play merchandise-based games to close the gap to conversion. Markkit’s lightweight social interactions enable peer-to-peer awareness, viral social consideration, and repeat style validation.  

Knowsy is a quiz-style game, aimed at driving these compulsive, simple interactions and increasing virality within and outside of the existing Markkit community.

 

PRODUCT GOAL

User acquisition and growth

TEAM MEMBERS

Product manager
Copywriter
iOS engineer

ROLE

Head of Design + UI/UX  (sole designer)

RESPONSIBILITIES

Research
UX and visual design
QA

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Research + Design

USER INTERVIEWS

We conducted user interviews to determine what would motivate them to share their Markkit content, and what type of game would keep them coming back for more.

DATA ANALYSIS

Alongside the Lead Engineer, I defined a list of the data we had access to that would resonate with our users — namely, their friends and their favorite products, outlined during the interview stage.

LOFI DESIGNS

We went through an aggressive conceptual design phase, where the team collaboratively created a crazy number of variations on a quiz-style game in an equally crazy short amount of time.

ITERATIONS

I took the data and feedback and created what felt like thousands of variations on a quiz-style game. We implemented the first iteration as quickly as possible, evaluated the results and iterated again.

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Solution

Our users told us that what motivated them was our best asset — free merch (duh)! Why didn’t we think of that?!

While we couldn’t exactly give our merchandise away for free — we still needed to turn a profit — we decided to offer deep discounts instead. The viral hook came into play when we chose to flip the recipient of the discount — rather than giving the game-playing user a discount, we offered a discount to the friend.

For example, if I were playing Knowsy to see how well I know you and totally nailed it with a perfect 100% score, YOU would get a discount on your next Markkit purchase. Cool, huh? As it turns out, our audience thought so too.

 
 

Results

+120% DAU

We saw an immediate increase in Daily Active Users (DAU) on the app — a huge jump from 5,000 to 11,000.

Plus, an increase in game actions (users playing more frequently and for longer periods of time) meant that we had accomplished our goal — create a compulsive game that everyone wants to play 🎉

 WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?

We continued to analyze our user data and iterate on the game design. Throughout Knowsy’s short life, we added deeper discounts and leaderboards, made the instructions more intuitive for new users, and optimized social sharing.

I created another interesting feature that played on the learnings we gained from Knowsy — that our users were more motivated to play and win for other folks in the app than even for themselves. The ‘Gifted’ tab is a screen that displays the total dollar amount (or merchandise, if applicable) that a user has won for other Knowsy players in the game — a way of showing how generous they’ve been. We didn’t get a chance to measure the engagement after launching this feature, but based on what we learned from Knowsy, I’m confident our users would’ve loved it.

 

CREATED USING

Photoshop
Illustrator
Google Analytics
MIXPANEL
Markkit users