After our last release, we decided the next stated goal should be improving the abandonment rate of the ‘Avoid’ mission in our game (see previous blog). The purpose of this mission was to teach players that the world had Newtonian mechanics, that an engine acting off-center-of-mass causes rotational acceleration.
However, to win the mission, the player needed to: add components via a build menu, connect some components, and then had to press play. All that before passively observing the outcome. There was too many steps and people were confused and quit. The feedback loop was too long and the path too wide.
To improve the mission we: changed to realtime feedback, prebuilt the ship, and pre-connected two engines with two constants. Thus, adjusting a constant turned the ship in a forward arc with acceleration changes felt immediately. The player could then “drive” then ship toward the target.
I thought that would turn out excellent, as we shorten the feedback cycle and concentrate on the mission lesson. I hoped for a pleasurable Ah-ha moment when the player figures out tank style driving.
However, I was so wrong. Our abandonment rate increased to 64%!
When observing players playing. We saw that the constant’s adjust menu moved under finger along with the ship, making it very hard to use. This caused extreme frustration from usability. So, we will try to fix that UX issue in our next release!
P.S. the funnel dashboard was a great investment. It has paid us back by pinpointing funnel issues by data. I blogged about how to build it at the time.
