Bringing the player’s wishlist onto their homepage for quick access and sale highlights to improve engagement and game sale revenue.
Wishlists connect players to platforms to publishers.
Wishlists are a vital part of the player discovery journey and a strategic tool for publishers to gauge interest and secure funding for games still in development.
Problem
Players rarely engage with their wishlist because it is hidden
Buried in the store page, it is hard to access and thus its value for discovery and engagement is limited.
Hypothesis
Surfacing Wishlist on the player’s homepage makes it easier for players to track and act on their interests, which increases engagement and drive revenue.
Overall, we are also looking to make the Xbox home more of the player’s own space, and bringing their wishlist home is a great first step.
Process
Competitive and Xbox ecosystem analysis + UR insights
We looked into competitors, what we already have in our ecosystem, what works and what doesn’t with the help of data insights from User Research.
Console store wishlist UI – We love how key details are highlighted.
We showcase games on your Wishlist on Console home and it performs well.
Explorations
We have existing templates for channel, so we explored which made the most sense for Wishlists.
Final Design
As we explored our options, we saw that our default templates didn’t support the level of detail we wanted, so we focused on surfacing key Wishlist metadata inspired by console UX in a new module. Since the goal was to create a launchpad into the Wishlist experience rather than replicate it, we simplified the module to show total games, Game Pass titles, and games on sale, with quick access share your Wishlist and to the full Wishlist page.
Highlights of the design process and final design
Background
Using MidJourney (AI), I created different placeholder arts for the background that illustrated the feeling I wanted to convey. I then used those exploration to communicate with the editorial/marketing team to create a background asset we could use.
Midjourney based on prompts “background, wishes, darker, shooting stars, minimal, gradients”
Mockup sent to Marketing/Editorial as inspiration.
Awesome custom art created for Wishlists!
Empty state + Teaching Tip
We saw an opportunity to educate players who hadn’t used the Wishlist feature by introducing it through an empty state experience. This also served as a consistent entry point to the Wishlist page. While reviewing gaps in the overall Wishlist journey, we hypothesized that many players don’t know how to quickly wishlist games while browsing.
Conclusion
Through a 1 month experiment, we saw increase in Wishlist engagement and game sale revenue.
Players were starting to clean up their wishlist that they had forgotten about, and saving new interests.
They were also better engaged with sales, and buying new games to play.
