Learning Launch

Challenge

I am working for a software editor, member of the gaming department and my challenge with my team is  to design new mobile games that we hope that large public will like and adopt them.

For our last mobile game application, we decided to adopt the design thinking process in order to design  innovative games and we will focus on trying to uncover during a first launch what our colleagues from  other departments consider to be enhanced and improved with regard the first testable prototype that  we developed.

Selection

As we progressed in the Design thinking process and we have a working prototype of our application, we  decided to try the learning launch tool in order to test our assumptions and prototype. The learning  launch will allow us to think fast and cheap by having a quick and inexpensive feedback and market-driven  data. We hope that the learning launch step will allow us to quickly identify the strengths and weaknesses  of our new mobile application and to prompt new ideas.

This is very important step as it will make our application resonate with live users and make the first  contact with reality. Learning launch should help us to improve our first prototype by being more agile,  responding quickly and doing incremental changes.

We selected 25 colleagues, equal percentage of males and females, from an age range corresponding to  our target audience (between 20 to 40 years old) and we are going to ask them to test the first prototype  for one week and submit their feedback.

Application     Two main assumptions were in the scope of our first learning launch process and we were ready to test  them.     The first assumption we tried to test is that our new application is easy to install, and the new player can  be on board quickly and easily. We asked our colleagues from other departments to download the  application on their mobile phones, install it and start to play. We have asked them also to send us their

feedback via anonymous survey. We also monitored how many clicks they did before start playing the  first level. We expected to have enough data to assess our assumption.    For the second test we focused on having more clarity about the future of the application by testing our  assumption related to how addictive is our game. Our team installed a tool that helped us to monitor how  long our colleagues spent time playing the game and how many levels they unlocked.     Insight

Thanks to the learning launch tool we have been able to clearly identify and test our main assumptions  within few days without spending a lot of time and money. The test of the first assumption helped us to  identify new ideas to simplify the onboarding of new users and make the interface more user-friendly and  intuitive while the test of the second assumptions showed that once the player start to play, he became  addictive to the game and was able to unlock many levels without stopping.

Moving forward, we are going to consider the findings related to the first assumption in the next prototype  and plan a new future launch design. We don’t consider this first launch as a failure as we learned a lot  and this will lead us to a better product.

Approach     After completing the previous steps of the design thinking process (what is? and what if? And what wow?)  and used the appropriate tools (mind mapping, storytelling..) we have been able to build our first  prototype and it was logical and necessary to proceed with a learning launch before officially release our  game. Thanks to the learning launch we collected insightful data that we are going to review it and used  for the second learning launch that should fix our first assumption and maybe generate other new ideas.

