Design team members: Leo Fisher, Yanong Li, Cristina Randall
Supervisor: Insook Min
Background
This project aims to create a holistic dashboard to allow Facebook game developers to quickly gauge the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of their game on Facebook and provide a convenient mechanism to queue and run A/B tests to improve these KPIs.
Games on Facebook, also known as Social Games, are by far the most popular activity on the social network. The developers of these games, are able to drive significant user adoption and revenues through a keen focus on analyzing the user metrics and a framework for testing out new ideas to improve user metrics.
Companies such as Zynga and Playdom are rumored to be making in excess of $50 Million dollars within two years of company launch and many attribute their success to the “maniacal focus analytics and experimental feature design”.
While there are many existing web metrics and testing platforms (most notably the suite of free products from Google), these products were not creating from the ground up for Facebook games and this represents a huge opportunity and product need.
Project description
The project being worked on is a comprehensive Metrics and Testing platform specifically built for Facebook games. It will seamlessly track the core metrics key to a games’ success and provide a lightweight framework to quickly set up, execute, and track A/B tests relevant to Facebook games.
Design methodology
The group will be working closely with a client to integrate this project into an upcoming game launch in 2010. As such the design process and requirements are driven entirely by the client needs and feedback as the project develops.
As of December 2009, the core metrics requirements were defined and an alpha test of the product will be going into production by January 2010.