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From Viral to Personal

Rethinking Social Gaming at Vidcade

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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,

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THE CHALLENGE

Expectations vs. Reality

Our early version of Vidcade had all the right ingredients for virality

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An Overall Leaderboard

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Cash Prize

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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.

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Not Playing

After onboarding, users weren't playing

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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

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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 14% of these new users were actually pressing play and submitting a video into gameplay.

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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

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STEP 1

View Prompt

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STEP 2

Check Contacts

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STEP 3

View Leaderboard

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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

We reframed our user flow by redesigning the entry point to highlight friend groups

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DESIGN SHIFT

Private Play UI

Redesigned the user interface to emphasize private play. Introduced privacy filters so only group members could view videos. We utilized these privacy spaces to encourage users to add each other as friends

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Only friend group members can view each others videos

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Encourage users to add each other as friends

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DESIGN SHIFT

Friend Group Feature

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FEATURE

While ideating on our redirection, I had an idea to add a smaller leaderboard for each friend group while gameplay was running.

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

14%

Activation Rate

AFTER

3.4

Min

Ave User Session

30%

Activation Rate

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 engagement. 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.

Thanks for reading!

Where do we go from here?

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