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VIDCADE
Making gameplay feel more personal than public.
ROLE
Founding Designer
SKILLS
End - End Product Design, Design System, Brand Identity
TIMELINE
3 Weeks, Ideation - Launch
OVERVIEW
Vidcade is a social game where users compete in daily challenges to win cash prizes. Initially launched as a "viral video game," the app encouraged users to create content around prompts. As the sole designer on the team I was tasked with creating new features that made Vidcade’s gameplay feel more personal.
I did this by conducting data analysis and user research in order to drive design decisions and pivoted our user interface to be a more friend-focused experience,
THE CHALLENGE
Expectations vs. Reality
Our early version of Vidcade had all the right ingredients for virality
An Overall Leaderboard
Cash Prize
Incentives for sharing
INITIAL PROBLEM
Our initial launch saw success. We targeted one High School and invited 10 students to play. Within a couple of hours our 10 students multiplied to hundreds of students all playing, creating, and sharing videos. So we began to expand to other schools and even university campuses. However, as more users came on to play, we noticed an issue...our users started getting shy.
Drop-off after the first post
Users started to play once, but didn’t come back
Hesitation to post publicly
Many users felt self-conscious posting silly videos as more users from different schools started playing
RESEARCH
A Look into the Data
Through interviewing our users and behavior tracking with mixpanel we uncovered some key insight
Mixpanel data showed us users were not posting
Our Mixpanel data showed that new users were downloading and signing on to the app. However, only around 12% of these new users were actually pressing play and submitting a video into gameplay.
Users were still checking out the app
Even though users weren’t playing as much they were still returning to the app daily. This showed that they were engaged but not participating.
Contacts page was our 2nd most visited page
Our most visited page after the prompt wasn’t the leaderboard, it was the contacts page, tucked away in their profile. This page had a feature that showed if your contacts was on the app and whether that contact had played.
CURRENT USER JOURNEY
After conducting our research we mapped out a typical user journey through the app. Users would enter the app and see the prompt of the day then check to see which of their friends played before leaving the app and returning when the winners were announced
STEP 1
View Prompt
STEP 2
Check Contacts
STEP 3
View Leaderboard
CRITICAL PRODUCT QUESTION
How might we make Vidcade feel more like a game you play with friends, not with an audience?
DESIGN SHIFT
Friend Group Feature
ONBOARDING
We reframed our user flow by redesigning the entry point to highlight friend groups
NEW FLOW
Install and Signup
Create a friend group or Invite friends
Play the game
DESIGN SHIFT
Private Play UI
IN APP FEATURES
Redesigned the user interface to emphasize private play.
NEW FEATURES
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Introduced privacy filters so only group members could view videos.
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We utilized these privacy spaces to encourage users to add each other as friends
KEY FEATURE: FUNNIEST FRIEND
While ideating on our redirection, I had an idea to add a smaller leaderboard for each friend group while gameplay was running.
DESIGN SHIFT
Funniest Friend Leaderboard
FEATURE
Every friend group can see how they ranked against each other
WHY?
-
We had the back-end logic
-
Implemented in 2 days
-
Low-cost + High-impact
OUTCOME
Measuring our Success
Our new friend group features alongside the new funniest friend leaderboard brought up not only our retention rates but also our average app session length
BEFORE
1.8
Min
Ave User Session
12%
7-Day Retention
AFTER
3.4
Min
Ave User Session
50%
7-Day Retention
REFLECTION
The Takeaways
This project taught me that good UX isn’t always about going bigger, sometimes, it’s about going closer. By shifting Vidcade from a public viral platform to a friend-focused experience, we unlocked a more authentic, comfortable way for users to engage. Designing around emotional safety, familiarity, and low-pressure fun led to a huge lift in both engagement and retention. The “Funniest Friend” feature worked because it mirrored real behavior, people already share funny videos in group chats. We just gave that instinct a home.
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