Airtime: Party Games
Chat with your friends and we’ll bring the games to you.
Product Design
Game Design
New Feature
0 to 1
Timeline
Design to Development: Jan 2021 - Aug 2021
Collaborators
Ankit Patel, Lead Software Engineer
Jesse Rabek, Director of Engineering, Games
Overall impact
Feature was launched in August 2021 and was able to see an overall increase of 86% in room activity, as well as active participation increase of 91%.
My contributions
I was the design lead in having to build a feature in Airtime’s rooms to help in promoting community games.
While working on this feature, I’ve contributed in discovery, user research, design, and testing.
TL;DR context
When having to work At Airtime (now known as Cantina Labs), I was working with a lot of ambiguity and having to figure out what made a social room become popular.
During my time here, I focused a lot on understanding what it meant to be able to bring joy during the pandemic. Since many people were having an itch to play games and stay connected with their friends, I’ve thought to myself: why not build a few games for this platform?
I’ve put my head down and figured out how to introduce few simple, yet addictive games people could play during the pandemic and looked into how we could help in growing the community.
With many tests with the company internally and working on beta tests with my friends, we were able to officially launch Airtime’s first gaming experience!
Context
In order for Airtime to grow their media capabilities, business asks were to find ways for us to better engage with our community and build new ways for people to mingle and ‘break the ice.’
Since joining, there was a lot of stagnation in terms of where the app was going. What once was in the top 20 downloads in the App Store, we’ve seen numbers of people feeling less of a need to use Airtime as their main social community.
Problem
Airtime did not provide enough additional qualities that allowed it to be different from other competitors.
31% decrease in userbase(measured from June 2021 - Dec 2021)
User research & feedback
Based on feedback from those that are heavily involved in social communities, I was able to see a general consensus amongst people who have used popular platforms like Discord.
Zach
People may use Airtime, but could lose the community to other communities that do it better.
- Zach, Discord User
James
If we’re able to make Airtime do things Discord can’t do, I can see success there.
- James, Discord User
Solution
Research, design, and develop various party games for Airtime to apply onto their native platforms and Web.
Why games?
- Mobile gaming within the U.S. was worth almost 10 billion U.S. dollars in 2019 and is expected to grow to over 11.35 billion U.S. dollars by 2025. (Statista)
- During COVID, Airtime’s usage has shot up exponentially to be in the top 100 apps being used under social media in the App Store and Google Play Store.
- Most popular games in mobile game category are: puzzles (59%), strategy (38%), trivia (33%) (Tapjoy)
Obstacles
Initially, I spent a lot of time trying to design and conceptualize games from the ground up, resulting in lost time, which was problematic for the project effort.
Competitors
Understand what people use.
By getting a good understanding of what people have been using frequently throughout the pandemic, I was able to see that there were common shares between these apps:
- Easy to chat.
With products like Discord, iMessage, and Messenger, it’s seen to be a very accessible app that everyone practically uses.
- Calling is easy.
All products provide an easy access to call your friends and family if they have the apps installed.
- When you’re bored, just send a game or join a channel.
Through easy communication and channel signals, easily hop in to play or chat with the people!
Design principles🕹🎮👾
How I approached this
Conceptualize!
- Building out games that relate back to comfort and relevance to today’s interests and trends
- Emphasizing upon what the Gen Z and Millennial audience cares for to help bring Airtime recognition
Inspirations
By gaining inspiration from some of the most popular games during COVID, I was able to take bits and pieces of what it meant to play mini games and party games.
The results
Through hashing things out throughout the design process, I was able to release a few games on Airtime!
- Building out games that relate back to comfort and relevance to today’s interests and trends
- Emphasizing upon what the Gen Z and Millennial audience cares for to help bring Airtime recognition
Game of Boards
Rules
- The more letters you use to help in making words, the higher the points!
- Similar to NY Times’ Wordle & Spelling Bee
Drawn Out
Rules
- You get to either be an artist or a guesser!
- Each artist gets a different prompt and 60 seconds to draw the prompt. All Artists draw at the same time.
- After the drawing phase, each Artist’s work is revealed and everyone must guess which prompt inspired it.
- The more people who guess your art correctly, the more points you gain! Guessers can also guess correctly and earn points alongside the Artists.
- Similar to Skribbl.io
What Are You Talking About?
Rules
- As a Speaker, you’ll have to describe phrases or words that you receive based on the topic you pick.
- Guessers will have to guess according to what the Speaker describes.
- Speakers gain points for describing their phrase/word and Guessers gain points for guessing correctly!
- Similar to Charades
Results & Takeaways
Since our creation of the games library, we were able to see a large increase of the community coming back to the platform!
After launch, people have been utilizing our app by:
- +6.7 room loads per day
- +4.5 game sessions per room per day
- +8.1 average players per room per day
- Increase of 65% user engagement with app per day
This was quite a super challenging, yet fun experience to do since my past experience with game design only ever came from college and wasn’t able to use my skills from my classes until Airtime came along. Since I was the only designer, I’ve come across a lot of obstacles with having to formulate ideas as time was ticking with our sprints and deadlines, but I thought that it would be a great chance for me to see how I could utilize popular games and reformat them in a way that makes sense for the community to use in-room. As of next steps, we looked to incorporate ‘slasher’ film concepts and use the emotion of fear as a way for us to tackle the next game.
Airtime: Party Games
Chat with your friends and we’ll bring the games to you.
Product Design
Game Design
New Feature
0 to 1
Timeline
Design to Development: Jan 2021 - Aug 2021
Collaborators
Ankit Patel, Lead Software Engineer
Jesse Rabek, Director of Engineering, Games
Overall impact
Feature was launched in August 2021 and was able to see an overall increase of 86% in room activity, as well as active participation increase of 91%.
My contributions
I was the design lead in having to build a feature in Airtime’s rooms to help in promoting community games.
While working on this feature, I’ve contributed in discovery, user research, design, and testing.
TL;DR context
When having to work At Airtime (now known as Cantina Labs), I was working with a lot of ambiguity and having to figure out what made a social room become popular.
During my time here, I focused a lot on understanding what it meant to be able to bring joy during the pandemic. Since many people were having an itch to play games and stay connected with their friends, I’ve thought to myself: why not build a few games for this platform?
I’ve put my head down and figured out how to introduce few simple, yet addictive games people could play during the pandemic and looked into how we could help in growing the community.
With many tests with the company internally and working on beta tests with my friends, we were able to officially launch Airtime’s first gaming experience!
Context
In order for Airtime to grow their media capabilities, business asks were to find ways for us to better engage with our community and build new ways for people to mingle and ‘break the ice.’
Since joining, there was a lot of stagnation in terms of where the app was going. What once was in the top 20 downloads in the App Store, we’ve seen numbers of people feeling less of a need to use Airtime as their main social community.
Problem
Airtime did not provide enough additional qualities that allowed it to be different from other competitors.
31% decrease in userbase(measured from June 2021 - Dec 2021)
User research & feedback
Based on feedback from those that are heavily involved in social communities, I was able to see a general consensus amongst people who have used popular platforms like Discord.
Zach
People may use Airtime, but could lose the community to other communities that do it better.
- Zach, Discord User
James
If we’re able to make Airtime do things Discord can’t do, I can see success there.
- James, Discord User
Solution
Research, design, and develop various party games for Airtime to apply onto their native platforms and Web.
Why games?
- Mobile gaming within the U.S. was worth almost 10 billion U.S. dollars in 2019 and is expected to grow to over 11.35 billion U.S. dollars by 2025. (Statista)
- During COVID, Airtime’s usage has shot up exponentially to be in the top 100 apps being used under social media in the App Store and Google Play Store.
- Most popular games in mobile game category are: puzzles (59%), strategy (38%), trivia (33%) (Tapjoy)
Obstacles
Initially, I spent a lot of time trying to design and conceptualize games from the ground up, resulting in lost time, which was problematic for the project effort.
Competitors
Understand what people use.
By getting a good understanding of what people have been using frequently throughout the pandemic, I was able to see that there were common shares between these apps:
- Easy to chat.
With products like Discord, iMessage, and Messenger, it’s seen to be a very accessible app that everyone practically uses.
- Calling is easy.
All products provide an easy access to call your friends and family if they have the apps installed.
- When you’re bored, just send a game or join a channel.
Through easy communication and channel signals, easily hop in to play or chat with the people!
Design principles🕹🎮👾
How I approached this
Conceptualize!
- Building out games that relate back to comfort and relevance to today’s interests and trends
- Emphasizing upon what the Gen Z and Millennial audience cares for to help bring Airtime recognition
Inspirations
By gaining inspiration from some of the most popular games during COVID, I was able to take bits and pieces of what it meant to play mini games and party games.
The results
Through hashing things out throughout the design process, I was able to release a few games on Airtime!
- Building out games that relate back to comfort and relevance to today’s interests and trends
- Emphasizing upon what the Gen Z and Millennial audience cares for to help bring Airtime recognition
Game of Boards
Rules
- The more letters you use to help in making words, the higher the points!
- Similar to NY Times’ Wordle & Spelling Bee
Drawn Out
Rules
- You get to either be an artist or a guesser!
- Each artist gets a different prompt and 60 seconds to draw the prompt. All Artists draw at the same time.
- After the drawing phase, each Artist’s work is revealed and everyone must guess which prompt inspired it.
- The more people who guess your art correctly, the more points you gain! Guessers can also guess correctly and earn points alongside the Artists.
- Similar to Skribbl.io
What Are You Talking About?
Rules
- As a Speaker, you’ll have to describe phrases or words that you receive based on the topic you pick.
- Guessers will have to guess according to what the Speaker describes.
- Speakers gain points for describing their phrase/word and Guessers gain points for guessing correctly!
- Similar to Charades
Results & Takeaways
Since our creation of the games library, we were able to see a large increase of the community coming back to the platform!
After launch, people have been utilizing our app by:
- +6.7 room loads per day
- +4.5 game sessions per room per day
- +8.1 average players per room per day
- Increase of 65% user engagement with app per day
This was quite a super challenging, yet fun experience to do since my past experience with game design only ever came from college and wasn’t able to use my skills from my classes until Airtime came along. Since I was the only designer, I’ve come across a lot of obstacles with having to formulate ideas as time was ticking with our sprints and deadlines, but I thought that it would be a great chance for me to see how I could utilize popular games and reformat them in a way that makes sense for the community to use in-room. As of next steps, we looked to incorporate ‘slasher’ film concepts and use the emotion of fear as a way for us to tackle the next game.
Airtime: Party Games
Chat with your friends and we’ll bring the games to you.
Product Design
Game Design
New Feature
0 to 1
Timeline
Design to Development: Jan 2021 - Aug 2021
Collaborators
Ankit Patel, Lead Software Engineer
Jesse Rabek, Director of Engineering, Games
Overall impact
Feature was launched in August 2021 and was able to see an overall increase of 86% in room activity, as well as active participation increase of 91%.
My contributions
I was the design lead in having to build a feature in Airtime’s rooms to help in promoting community games.
While working on this feature, I’ve contributed in discovery, user research, design, and testing.
TL;DR context
When having to work At Airtime (now known as Cantina Labs), I was working with a lot of ambiguity and having to figure out what made a social room become popular.
During my time here, I focused a lot on understanding what it meant to be able to bring joy during the pandemic. Since many people were having an itch to play games and stay connected with their friends, I’ve thought to myself: why not build a few games for this platform?
I’ve put my head down and figured out how to introduce few simple, yet addictive games people could play during the pandemic and looked into how we could help in growing the community.
With many tests with the company internally and working on beta tests with my friends, we were able to officially launch Airtime’s first gaming experience!
Context
In order for Airtime to grow their media capabilities, business asks were to find ways for us to better engage with our community and build new ways for people to mingle and ‘break the ice.’
Since joining, there was a lot of stagnation in terms of where the app was going. What once was in the top 20 downloads in the App Store, we’ve seen numbers of people feeling less of a need to use Airtime as their main social community.
Problem
Airtime did not provide enough additional qualities that allowed it to be different from other competitors.
31% decrease in userbase(measured from June 2021 - Dec 2021)
User research & feedback
Based on feedback from those that are heavily involved in social communities, I was able to see a general consensus amongst people who have used popular platforms like Discord.
Zach
People may use Airtime, but could lose the community to other communities that do it better.
- Zach, Discord User
James
If we’re able to make Airtime do things Discord can’t do, I can see success there.
- James, Discord User
Solution
Research, design, and develop various party games for Airtime to apply onto their native platforms and Web.
Why games?
- Mobile gaming within the U.S. was worth almost 10 billion U.S. dollars in 2019 and is expected to grow to over 11.35 billion U.S. dollars by 2025. (Statista)
- During COVID, Airtime’s usage has shot up exponentially to be in the top 100 apps being used under social media in the App Store and Google Play Store.
- Most popular games in mobile game category are: puzzles (59%), strategy (38%), trivia (33%) (Tapjoy)
Obstacles
Initially, I spent a lot of time trying to design and conceptualize games from the ground up, resulting in lost time, which was problematic for the project effort.
Competitors
Understand what people use.
By getting a good understanding of what people have been using frequently throughout the pandemic, I was able to see that there were common shares between these apps:
- Easy to chat.
With products like Discord, iMessage, and Messenger, it’s seen to be a very accessible app that everyone practically uses.
- Calling is easy.
All products provide an easy access to call your friends and family if they have the apps installed.
- When you’re bored, just send a game or join a channel.
Through easy communication and channel signals, easily hop in to play or chat with the people!
Design principles🕹🎮👾
How I approached this
Conceptualize!
- Building out games that relate back to comfort and relevance to today’s interests and trends
- Emphasizing upon what the Gen Z and Millennial audience cares for to help bring Airtime recognition
Inspirations
By gaining inspiration from some of the most popular games during COVID, I was able to take bits and pieces of what it meant to play mini games and party games.
The results
Through hashing things out throughout the design process, I was able to release a few games on Airtime!
- Building out games that relate back to comfort and relevance to today’s interests and trends
- Emphasizing upon what the Gen Z and Millennial audience cares for to help bring Airtime recognition
Game of Boards
Rules
- The more letters you use to help in making words, the higher the points!
- Similar to NY Times’ Wordle & Spelling Bee
Drawn Out
Rules
- You get to either be an artist or a guesser!
- Each artist gets a different prompt and 60 seconds to draw the prompt. All Artists draw at the same time.
- After the drawing phase, each Artist’s work is revealed and everyone must guess which prompt inspired it.
- The more people who guess your art correctly, the more points you gain! Guessers can also guess correctly and earn points alongside the Artists.
- Similar to Skribbl.io
What Are You Talking About?
Rules
- As a Speaker, you’ll have to describe phrases or words that you receive based on the topic you pick.
- Guessers will have to guess according to what the Speaker describes.
- Speakers gain points for describing their phrase/word and Guessers gain points for guessing correctly!
- Similar to Charades
Results & Takeaways
Since our creation of the games library, we were able to see a large increase of the community coming back to the platform!
After launch, people have been utilizing our app by:
- +6.7 room loads per day
- +4.5 game sessions per room per day
- +8.1 average players per room per day
- Increase of 65% user engagement with app per day
This was quite a super challenging, yet fun experience to do since my past experience with game design only ever came from college and wasn’t able to use my skills from my classes until Airtime came along. Since I was the only designer, I’ve come across a lot of obstacles with having to formulate ideas as time was ticking with our sprints and deadlines, but I thought that it would be a great chance for me to see how I could utilize popular games and reformat them in a way that makes sense for the community to use in-room. As of next steps, we looked to incorporate ‘slasher’ film concepts and use the emotion of fear as a way for us to tackle the next game.