By Maghilnan Subburaj — Product Team, Hike
The home screen of any app is often the first thing that users see when they launch the app. It’s an essential part of the user experience and can greatly impact how players engage with the app. Therefore, it’s crucial to design an effective home screen that can help players navigate the app and easily access the features they need.
Rush’s home screen since the beginning was a simple layout, with games listed down vertically in small and big tiles. This served the purpose when we had fewer games on the platform. However, once we increased the number of games on our platform, the simple layout that we had was not the best solution. So we got back to the whiteboard and sketched our thoughts, our goal was to design something that is simple and familiar to understand and navigate around yet content rich & scalable.
We at Hike are highly data and research-driven, so we started gathering everything that we knew about our current home screen and our users’ behaviour associated with it.
We broadly found that
- Users like to play their favourite games and want to play it without a lot of hassle.
- Even though we have 10+ games on the platform, most users preferred to play 1 or 2 specific games that they liked the most. Users like to have options but have specific preferences when it comes to actual gameplay
- Users don’t like ads or banners on the home screen, they want relevant and contextual content to be shown to them.
Based on the above understanding, we wanted to do the following:
- Introduce a two-dimensional layout (horizontal rows and vertical columns) to incorporate more relevant content
- Introduce differently sized tiles to emphasize the importance of the content shown.
- Personalized the user experience.
- Add elements to grab attention to specific games tiles
- Create product marketing banners as native as possible, without making them look like ads
So we came up with the following,
Recommendation Section
- We always knew the top left corner of the app gets the most attention, we wanted to show the most relevant games for the users over here, our goal with this section is to recommend the game that the user would want to play.
Popular Section
- This is a place right below the recommended section, here, we focus on cross-selling games based on the user preference.
Product Marketing Section
- Here we market product features, such as Tournaments, Deposit Offers, etc
- For example, Tournaments are a format of game play in Rush, and they are the most fun, you get to win a higher amount with relatively lesser expense, and we wanted to market it in a non-intrusive way
Game Tags
- Game tags are a way to bring attention to game tiles, they act as a cherry on top, and focus on grabbing the user’s attention.
All Games Section
- This is the complete catalogue of games that we provide at the end of the screen for users to be able to easily navigate through the complete content on the platform.
Navigation Bar
- The navigation bar is as important as the home screen since it helps the user navigate to other screens from the home screen.
- We keep the most pivotal screens for a great user experience in the navigation bar such as Wallet, add money, Referrals, etc.
