How to Create UX that Drives Retention & Monetization, with Alfonzo Burton

Jordan: 00:00

Welcome to PlayMakers. I'm your host Jordan Blackman, and you know the drill. Every week I interview a game industry expert and I go deep with them on what they know to pull away things that are going to be useful to you in what you do, while also giving you a bigger, wider picture. This is a way for you to break out of your box while also going deeper into your box. You might call it a para-box, or not, I don't know. But this week we have Alfonzo Burton. We're talking UX. He is a master on this subject. There's a lot to learn. Stay tuned.

Jordan: 00:37

So here's the deal with Alfonzo. I was looking for a UX expert to work with on a project, and we ended up talking to each other, and I was so impressed with this guy that I invited him on the show on the spot. So, the deal with Alfonzo is that he has worked on several free-to-play mobile games that have broken the 100-million mark. He typically has several, you know, apps in the top 100 grossing on the App Store at any given time. He was a UX director at both Glu and Pocket Gems, and now he's the CEO and creative director at UX Magicians, and they're a full-service UX design agency kind of deal, and they will rock your UX if you're looking for that sort of thing. And even if you're not, you are going to get a ton out of this episode because we talk about misconceptions about UX.

Jordan: 01:48

We talk about what Alfonzo thinks are the keys to a hit game, what UX really is, because it's not what you think, and when to innovate in the UX and when to stick to things that work. We talk about Machine Zone and why their games do so well, even though they're kind of fugly.

Jordan: 02:44

Now, real quick, before we get into the interview, I want to say a couple of things. One: If you haven't subscribed to Playmakers Insiders, you got to do that. Go to playmakerspodcast.com and you can sign up there. You won't miss any episodes, and we have exclusives, and you're going to find out how to ask questions in advance and all sorts of cool stuff like that. So head over to playmakerspodcast.com and become an insider. Also, if you're digging the show, if you're getting a lot out of it, please write us a review on iTunes and tell us what you want to hear on the show in the future—what guests, what topics. That is how we bring you what you want, and that's also how we know that we're doing a good job. And it's also how I grow the show. I really need those interviews. It makes a big difference. So for those of you who are doing them, I really, really appreciate it. And with that, here is Alfonzo.

Jordan: 02:44

Alfonzo, thank you so much for being on the show. I'm really excited to have you on.

Alfonzo: 02:47

Yeah. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate you having me on here. I'm excited about it.

Jordan: 02:51

Well, you know, we had the opportunity to connect a little bit professionally and just talking with you in that context, I was so excited by what you had to say and your insights were so good. I was like, you've got to come on the show. So thanks for agreeing to do it.

Alfonzo: 03:04

I appreciate it. I really appreciate it.

Jordan: 03:06

So I know that you started in web and then made the transition to kind of mobile and game, and now like, you know, console game UX too, I think. What was that transition like for you, and, you know, what were you kind of learning yourself as you go, and what did you bring to the table from Web?

Alfonzo: 03:21

This is the thing about the Web. The Web taught us everything about how to engage users, or players, if you would. Because in the early days of Web, we learned about banner ads and the whole point of banner ads was to get people to click through and you wanted the highest click-through rate. So we did probably thousands of banner ads. And then the point was to get them to the websites we were building, and when they came to the websites, we had to keep them engaged, we had to lead them through the website.

This is all before it was even called user experience. And one of the things that we found in early web is that games were the things that were the sticky pieces of the websites. And so it got really good at, one, the acquisition of users into a website and then how to keep them there.

Jordan: 04:07

I remember seeing banner ads that were like little games.

Alfonzo: 04:10

Oh yeah, I mean, we did everything from click-throughs to, "hey, win this car," to little games. I mean, banner ads are still used a lot, but not like it was in the early days of the web, and just learning how to engage players was huge, and it translates one-to-one in games. And so most of everything that I learned from the website side of the business, when we get into games, games are just more features, but it's the same way that you engage players. You just have a little more features to tap on. So it's a one-to-one translation for sure.

Jordan: 04:44

And was there anything that you kind of didn't expect coming into games, or that surprised you?

Alfonzo: 04:50

No, because we've always been a fan of games, and we've built so many games. We've probably built 300 games for AOL back when the Flash games were big. So we did casual games before they were even called casual games. So, when we got into the mobile space and into the console space, we love games, so we've always played them. We've always sat down and played them, and we're like, "oh, they should do this," or "this should happen," or "this is confusing," or "this is weird."

So once we got a chance to get our hands on the UX, it was just like, do what we intuitively thought, and it works. And it just started working, and games started going number one, and, you know, making a lot of money, and so it was a nice transition.

Jordan: 05:25

And what about going the other way around? Like, are there kind of misconceptions about UX that you've encountered over and over again with your clients and on projects you've worked on?

Alfonzo: 05:34

This is one of the best questions in the world. I love this question. There is the huge misconception, and this is the one thing about it. Everyone thinks that they can do UX. Everyone. VPs, GMs, producers, executive producers are like, "Hey, we can do UX." And I always relate it to this point: you rarely see anybody go to the lead engineer and say, "Hey, I figured out the code. I know how to do this AI," right? It's hands-off. They kind of just leave the engineers to do what they do, but they have that same thought about UX. They feel like, "Hey, because I can see it, because the color's blue, I want it green, or I've seen it somewhere else, so I know."

And so the biggest misconception is that UX is a process. It's a process of coming up with the right solutions, and you have to go through that process. You can't just say, "Hey, do this," because you have no idea—if you change one thing or make something deep in a game, it can affect the entire product. And so, that is the biggest misconception. You really need people that understand how to engage players in a digital world to create top-grossing hits.

Jordan: 06:37

So, in other words, people don't realize that it actually is a process.

Alfonzo: 06:41

Exactly. And it's because it's so easy to look over someone's shoulder, especially a UI designer or someone that's working on the game, and they say, "Oh, well, let's move that to the left," or "Let's move that to the right," or "Here's a feature we want to add—put that button here." Again, we ask, why would that button exist there? Do we need that button there? You know, and there's a long process of testing and putting it in and testing again with live users to really figure out if it makes sense to be there. And those who don't do that typically don't reach the top 150 grossing in mobile.

Jordan: 07:10

That's interesting. Cause yeah, one of the things I also wanted to ask you about was sort of best practice versus innovation, and talking about it as a process, I think shows where I think you might go in terms of, you know, you can't answer that in abstraction. It's sort of about the process of testing.

Alfonzo: 07:27

And that's the one thing I love about UX. It is a process, it's an architectural process, it is like engineering something, and there are core pillars. And if you just do the process, it works. And so, you know, for us, what we've seen over the number of years—having 11 top-grossing games and two still sitting in the top 100 grossing right now—is that there are three core pillars to creating a hit. First, it's gotta be fun.

Jordan: 07:53

You gotta tell us what they are. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Alfonzo: 07:56

First pillar is, it's gotta be fun. You've gotta have a fun core mechanic. If you have a fun game, it is so much easier to make money with a fun game.

Jordan: 08:06

And let's say you got a team and like a couple people think it's fun, a couple people don't think it's fun. How do we decide?

Alfonzo: 08:12

Well, it's all about testing. So it's all about numbers, right? So if you have four people and it's half and half, well, you got to get some more people in the room. Hopefully, you can get a couple thousand into the game with some simple tasks or even a few hundred into the game.

And again, if you have really good designers and people on your team, you can tell if the game is fun or not. You know, there's some bit to it. You know, if it's split down the middle, user testing will tell you everything. Just put it in the hands of some strangers and they'll tell you the truth about your game. And so, that's a core pillar of doing that.

Alfonzo: 08:46

The second pillar is a deep economy. I can't stress enough—you have to allow players to be able to invest deeply. You know what a great game was? Smashing Roads. You ever played Smashing Roads? There you go, that's a great point! One of the funnest games ever, Smashing Roads. It kind of takes the GTA mechanic of getting chased around, and it's a fun game, it's a great core mechanic, but it doesn't have any monetization strategy to it. You just buy premium cars, and you just keep buying the new car. That gets old after a while.

Jordan: 09:15

It feels like a toy rather than a game.

Alfonzo: 09:18

That's exactly right. So it shot up to the charts because it was fun, but then it's nowhere to be found because there is just nothing there to sustain the game as a business. So you need a deep economy. And there's a lot to that as well.

Alfonzo: 09:31

The third thing is great UI/UX. And that's where we come in—if you have a great economy, and yet players can't access that deep economy because it's confusing, or it's all over the place, or it's just ugly, no one's ever going to play your deep economy. So you have to have great UI/UX to access all those wonderful features. And that's why UI/UX is so important.

I tell people all the time, nobody comes into a game and says, "Hey, your code looks fantastic." No one cares about the code—you don't see it. No one ever comes in and says, "Hey, your deep systems are fantastic." No one says that either. They either say it's beautiful and it works well, or it does not. And so that's why UI/UX is so important to get it right.

Jordan: 10:11

Right. And, you know, we're in a world now where the free games that people download on their phone have budgets in the multi-millions. So, you know, one of the ways you can at least compete is to have a beautiful-looking UI and UX.

Alfonzo: 10:27

It's so true. And the tricky part about it is that you spend, let's say, a few million dollars on a game, and you're literally giving it away for free. You had better make sure that that UI/UX, and that gameplay is fun, and you have a deep enough economy, or, you know, you're going to be closing your doors pretty quickly, being that you're not going to make any money.

Jordan: 10:48

You know, this term UX, I've always thought it kind of funny, because what isn't UX? What is not part of the user experience?

Alfonzo: 10:55

So that's a great question, right? The user experience is everything. How I coin it, I look at it like this: when players put your game down and they walk away, do they think about your game again? That's a good experience. Everything within that game was the experience.

A lot of times when we're doing consulting, it is very siloed and they say, "Hey, we just want you to focus on the UI or we want you to focus on the flow." But we know as designers and UX experts that it is everything. So part of what we do is we'll talk about the sound, the economy, the game balancing, and the fun of the game.

Even though we are very focused narrowly on the overall flow or UI, we definitely know if it's fun, and we definitely know if the economy is deep or if it's right, or if it's going to make money. So UX is very broad, but when it comes to boots on the ground, it can be very narrow, like doing UI, buttons, interface transitions, and overall flow—how you get from one page to the next.

Jordan: 11:58

I have to ask you a little bit more about UX process. So you've given us the three keys to succeed from your point of view, which is awesome. What is your perspective on the process of UX? How would you lay that out?

Alfonzo: 12:08

It's a fantastic question. It's tried and true. I will tell you the secrets of the magic man right here. So, if you have a project and you're going to do the UI/UX, the first thing we always say is, figure out what it's going to look like first. The game design can still be figured out, the economy can still be figured out, they're still working on the gameplay, but if you come in and figure out what the game is going to look like—all the buttons, the theme, and the style—you have a locked product.

Once you have that locked style, we go for two or three different styles. We already know we're not going to try to come out the first time and say, "Here it is. This is the first time we tried." We already know we're going to do it at least two or three times because you want to make sure that you've tried every idea you could possibly try. So you can choose the best one. You don't want to just do one and then try to edit it down until everybody sort of likes it. Get the one that everyone loves, not the one everyone's just trying to like.

Jordan: 13:06

So like an iterative prototype style approach to UI.

Alfonzo: 13:10

You have to do that. And I say, you have to let the design process have its day, have its say—it just takes time. So you want to allot that time because once you do it, you never have to pivot. So many games pivot because they get halfway through, and people get tired of looking at it, or it didn’t quite fit, or it’s too heavy. If you just do all the hard work up front, you’ll never have to pivot again.

The second thing, once you get your actual look and feel, then you start working on the overall flow and the overall layout of every page. Once you do a layout, you can actually apply the approved design style to it. So you're actually doing UX and UI at the same time. A lot of teams I see will do all the wires and layouts, but they still don't know what their product needs to look like. Then they hire a UI designer to come and paint in the boxes.

The challenge with that is that sometimes design informs function. So it could literally change the entire page based on the design you're going to do. So you need to do those together. That is the simplest process to do, and it's tried and true. If you do it every single time—the ad agencies do it, that’s how they get you to click on things, that’s how websites are done, that’s how apps are done—now we're applying that same process to games. It just works.

Jordan: 14:30

So the mistake is to lay out a bunch of wireframes and then kind of lay a UI over it. And the right approach is to figure out the look that the whole UI is going to have upfront, and then you can move those pieces around, kind of within, for the needs of that specific part of the UI.

Alfonzo: 14:49

Exactly. Because while you're figuring out the look, what we do is we take the hardest system in the game and we figure out the look for that. So now you have a look and you know how your product is actually going to work. Once you have those two together, then you just apply it to the rest of the game. It's just that simple. It becomes more like autopilot. You can actually hand it off to more of a junior UI/UX designer to carry that design throughout the game, because you've figured out all the hard stuff upfront.

Jordan: 15:18

So it sounds like, you know, you'd love it if people would call you up really early on in their development.

Alfonzo: 15:23

That's one of the things. People like to call, "Hey, we got the game figured out, we got all this stuff figured out." And then at the end, they start calling UI/UX. We're like, okay, now we're painted in a corner. We have all these technical limitations and all these constraints. And so, we love pre-greenlight.

The sooner you get UI/UX involved, the more likely you're not going to pivot. So, you gotta get it up sooner. One thing I love about the trend we're seeing in games is that, before, UI was an afterthought; now it's a thought that's coming upfront. It still needs to be brought in earlier and earlier in the process. A lot of teams are like, "Hey, when do we bring the UI/UX in?" And I always say, bring them in right away. I mean, we come in on some projects pre-greenlight just to create an overall look and feel to see if the executives want to buy in on a game. It's hard to buy in on a game if you don’t know what it looks like, but once you figure out the look, at least some concepts, you can start deciding if it's something you want to invest in.

Jordan: 16:17

And you know, even consumers and customers are experiencing things sooner, right? Whether it's Kickstarter or Steam Greenlight, so I would want to bring you in before doing those things.

Alfonzo: 16:30

It's a great point. We've been on some projects where it was right after greenlight and we literally came up with two or three looks and feels, and then we tested them. I mean, what a great idea. Why don't you test whether the style is going to work early on so that you know what you're working on for the next year is actually going to work? I mean, that is proper UI/UX, and it's a little harder for some teams to do than others. Some people are more comfortable with that than others, but if you did it every time, your shots on goal and your chances of having a top-grossing hit would increase drastically.

Jordan: 17:01

Okay, so I asked some people in the Playmakers community for some questions for you. I said, "Hey, I’m going to be talking to one of the top UX designers with multiple games in the top 100. What do you want to know?" And I got a couple of questions from them. So, the first one was actually specifically about the kinds of UI that we see in games like what Machine Zone does, right? You know, it's pretty ugly, right? And you think, gosh, like, couldn't they do better? Why don’t they improve it? So, you know, what's up with that?

Alfonzo: 17:29

I love it. I love it. So first of all, you got to look at Machine Zone. You've got to give credit where credit is due, right? They've been in the top 10 for a long time. So when we say bad versus good, you know, it's kind of, it's kind of relative, right? It's good because it's one of the most successful games that’s ever been created.

I understand what people mean by it's bad. Like if you get into it, it's hard to figure out. It's hard to engage with. It actually doesn't even look that good. But the thing is, they built that game. And so when you first build a game, it is what it is when you go to market. Their UI is a product of their success because everyone learned it the way it is, and everyone knows how to play it like that. If they were to drastically change it, you could piss the whole community off, and that affects your monetization.

It is a huge risk that once players figure out your game, to change things. We've seen that in Windows, we've seen that in iOS, we've seen that in everything. If you change it midway after everybody's learned it, it's just frustrating at that point. So it’s a product of their own success, and the best thing they could do is create a new IP and try to figure that out.

That's why I say UI/UX upfront is so critical, because if you get it right and then you're successful, well, that's great. But if you get it wrong and then it's successful, you're stuck with what you have. Then it’s harder to have new players come into the game because it's just hard to understand.

So that's the thing about Machine Zone and other games. But look at something like Clash Royale, right? Phenomenal. That game is the funnest game ever. I was highly addicted. I just had to delete it off my phone because I was spending too much, and it was taking over my life. But it has great UX, great UI, and great gameplay.

They don’t really need to change it very much. There are still some issues with it that I have some problems with, where they had to shoehorn in some features later on. But overall, it’s a fantastic experience, and it looks gorgeous. So they did it right the first time, and they don’t have to go back and redo it.

Jordan: 19:29

So with something like Machine Zone, you know, now that they're kind of stuck with what they've got. But I wonder—I'll tell you—I wonder if like, it's sort of bad on purpose. Like it’s confusing so that they can kind of lead you through it the way that they’d like more easily.

Alfonzo: 19:44

The only reason I don't say that is because I know a lot of the designers, right? I know them personally, I try to hire them, I look at their resumes, I see their portfolios. Typically, nothing is done bad on purpose. Things are only done with the quality of the person that’s working on the product. So whoever it was that was an artist, they’re a passionate artist. They love to do this stuff. They love to design. They’ve been in this business for a long time. And when they sit down and do a project, they’re very passionate about it. So they did the best they could do on that project.

Jordan: 20:13

I don’t mean bad on purpose, but like that the, the, you know, the multitude—the insane multiplicity—of options on every screen, for example, is like, you know, creates a situation where it’s kind of easy to say, “but this is the one we want you to do right now.”

Alfonzo: 20:27

Again, that just goes back to because they are successful, it's hard to change things. And good UX is really a lot about categorization and how you prioritize things. It’s kind of like Clash Royale—it's a good UI, but you'll see some places where they just had to stick something in there because there was nowhere else to put it, because they didn’t think about it long-term.

A lot of people, when they build games, are thinking, “Hey, if it lasts six months, we're happy.” And that's the experience you get. When we design games, we design it so that it will last at least 24 months. And so, these systems aren’t expandable because people don’t really understand UX that well, or they haven't done the process in the right way. So, they’re stuck with what they have. I call it stickers. You just keep putting stickers in your game because you add features, and you put it wherever you want. And by the end, you know, two years into the game, it’s just like buttons everywhere. Clash of Clans was like that—successful game, but man, there’s a lot of stuff just kind of stuck on there because they didn’t know where else to put the feature.

Jordan: 21:27

Well, from my experience on Frontierville and Castleville, I can tell you, like, any game that's a couple of years old, the UX experience has probably gone down in a lot of respects, at least if you’re a new user. Because over time, they just have to introduce new features, which means new buttons that weren’t planned for, and also just more.

Alfonzo: 21:47

That’s exactly right. And it’s not just games that are doing this—any digital experience is like that. If you look at the new iOS, right? There are some really great things about it, but there are also some new frustrating features that got introduced because they’re just trying to pack more into it. That’s the UX challenge for a UX designer—to get that right. It all starts with a good core, though. That’s why you want to do it upfront, better, create good systems that we call expandable—scale the systems themselves out of scale.

Here’s a good example: a sliding side-to-side scrolling menu. If you have 10 weapons and you scroll left to right, that works because there are only 10—you’ll only have to scroll three or four times. But if the plan calls for a hundred weapons, that’s not a good system to lead with. You need a new system. You need some filtering, you need some tabs, and you need to be able to categorize those things. That’s what I mean by the difference between one system versus another system. There are systems in UX that are scalable, and some are not scalable at all. So, you’ve got to figure that out upfront.

Jordan: 22:49

And you don’t necessarily know. Maybe you don’t expect weapons to be a huge monetization feature, and it turns out that’s what ends up selling. So, you’re going to need to suddenly have a lot more than you expected.

Alfonzo: 22:59

Well, that’s where a good UX designer comes in. If someone tells me, “We’re making a game with weapons, and their core monetization is the weapons themselves,” and they're like, “Oh, we’re only going to create 10,” I already know that’s wrong. I’ve seen it too many times. I’m going to say, “No. If these are successful, this is your core monetization. So, we need a system that’s going to be able to expand because that’s the only way you’re making money.”

And so, that’s what I mean by the three pillars. You really have to understand all those pillars. You can’t just come in and say, “Hey, I’m going to create something beautiful.” It actually has to be functional and work, and you have to be able to think about those things.

Jordan: 23:33

It would be pretty interesting for, like, Machine Zone—it’s Game of War, and then they have that Mobile Strike, right? It would be interesting to kind of analyze the differences from a UI standpoint between those two games—like what they did from one to the other, and what they learned.

Alfonzo: 23:52

It's always good to do that. We did that back with Deer Hunter and Dino Hunter. We learned a lot from Deer Hunter. Deer Hunter went on to do 200 million-plus, and it was a pretty fun game. And then with Dino Hunter, we took some of those learns and put them into Dino Hunter. And I know Machine Zone does the same thing. It’s one of those things where you want to extend the games you have in your product line, but you don't want to break anything, but there are a lot of lessons learned.

Alfonzo: 24:15

But even if you play Mobile Strike, you’ll see that they’ve adopted a lot of the problems they had in the original game. And there are some things that are improved, but again, I think that was a good opportunity to actually improve on the systems. But I already know how it works internally. There are people who say, “Hey, less risk is better. We don’t want to spend all this money and not have it be successful.” So, usually, you adopt those problems because you don’t think they're problems since some success is being generated.

Jordan: 24:47

The devil you know.

Alfonzo: 24:48

That’s a great point right there. It’s awesome.

Jordan: 24:51

Another question that came from the Facebook community is, especially on mobile, I think a lot of people are thinking, “Oh, it’s a bunch of best practices.” You know, if I had a bunch of best practices... And I think to some extent you’ve already pointed out, well, no, it’s also a process. How do you decide when to follow what’s worked, like we were saying with Machine Zone, and when to try to innovate and do something new and different?

Alfonzo: 25:14

That’s a great point. I have some good answers for how to think about that. One is that there is a process of onboarding new players—or new users if you’re in the app world. The idea is that you don’t want to have this whole story, this five-minute tutorial on how to teach them about your game. So, any system that you can take from other places that people already know, it’s a good idea to use those systems on a big global scale.

What I mean by that is like the hamburger menu, for instance. Everyone knows what that is. You tap that—you might not know what’s inside it, but you know if you tap that, you're going to access some other features, right? That’s something you don’t have to train, you don’t have to tutorialize, you don’t have to have an arrow bouncing, “Click this for the menu,” those types of things. So, it’s like, why not use that? Millions of people use it, so when you use something like that, you're already getting access to a very broad audience that understands how your game works. So, you balance those things out.

Now, when you get deeper into the game and you’re on a page like, “Hey, I want to socket a rune to my sword to make it better,” well, there’s no real standard system for doing that. So, why not create something fun, something no one’s ever seen before, something that they can learn and engage with and have a lot of time with? I mean, if you copy a rune system from another game, they’re just going to say, “Well, this is just like this game,” right?

There’s no real brand differentiation. So that’s how we look at it. If it’s core flow and core navigation to get into the game and understand it, it’s wise to use systems that people already know. But when you start getting into the nitty-gritty gameplay, that’s where you want to differentiate yourself, innovate, and create new things to do. You wouldn’t want to go out there and just copy Clash Royale’s gameplay system. They’ve already done it, you know. How can you improve upon that?

Jordan: 27:10

I have a similar way that I look at design sometimes, which is: Let people play the game. This is for like mainstream mobile mass market stuff. But let people play the game without having to learn anything. Make it really easy to just play and enjoy the basic mechanic. But then always add some elements that you're going to have to learn and study so that there is a depth there, but the depth is optional.

Alfonzo: 27:33

That's exactly right. And that’s why I say UI/UX—part of it is just access. You’re accessing the fun. If I created a brand new type of menu that no one’s ever seen or knows how to work, well, now you’ve created friction to access the fun. It’s just going to take them that much longer to get involved in your game. So, remove as much friction as you can, get into the game, have some fun, play a little bit, and then they’ll be like, “Hey, I like this game, I want to engage with these other systems,” and then they’ll take the time to figure out how they work.

Jordan: 28:00

So, you mentioned to me, when we were chatting before the interview started, that you’re just launching a new website. So, I’d love to hear about that, and what you’re doing with UX Magicians, and all that.

Alfonzo: 28:10

Yeah, we're totally excited. So, after several years in business now, we launched our first brand-new website, and we are now officially a full-service UI/UX agency. What that means to us is that we can come in, we do all the research, we do all the UI, we do all the UX. But now we’re actually coding. Part of our process is that we’ve been handing a lot of PSDs to engineers, and they have to kind of figure out how things transition and animate. But because of that, a lot gets lost in translation. So, now we’re doing end-to-end. We’re going to design it, we’re going to figure it out, and then we’re going to build it and put it into Unity or whatever engine the game team is using, so that we can control the entire experience, do all the animations, all the special effects, all the 3D, all of that stuff.

And so, we’ve got a brand-new website showcasing that. I’m super excited. We’ve got a bunch of new projects that we did, like the WWE 2K17, and now we’re getting some mobile and other games. We’re working with a lot of Asian publishers because they have a lot of hits over there, and they want to bring them to the Western market, right? But their UI/UX is really different than the Western market. Yes, that stuff doesn’t work here, and vice versa—a lot of our Western UI/UX doesn’t work over in Asia. And so part of that is surfacing that on our website to show we’re doing a lot of East-to-West games and games from West to East. So, we’re really excited about that. We’ve got a brand-new newsletter—there’s a form at the very bottom of the footer to go and sign up for our newsletter, so people can just keep up to date with what we’ve got going on.

Jordan: 29:39

And where do they go?

Alfonzo: 29:39

www.uxmagicians.com

Jordan: 29:43

Nice. So, you know, one more quick question before I let you go, Alfonzo. You mentioned 2K, and I know that you worked on the console version. I’m kind of curious—there are some things that you might not be able to talk about—but just from that experience and on making the transition to console, are your clients on console seeing the conversions and kind of the improvement that your mobile clients have also seen?

Alfonzo: 30:05

Yes, like I said before, it's just a digital product. This process works across the board. And so we came in, and if you look at the 2K16 version, it was a good game, but if you go and try to play with some of the metagame and the systems, it's very hard and confusing to figure things out. So, we completely retooled and optimized the system, and the community responded.

Alfonzo: 30:27

We’ve gotten nothing but positive feedback on the new UX and how it works a lot better, it looks a lot better, to the point where, you know, we’re able to work on the next installment of that with those guys. It’s pretty exciting. Those guys over at 2K are very talented, and we’re really excited to work with them. It’s going to be a really good case study, especially as we believe that console is actually going to move to a free-to-play economy. And it’s going to be great for us because we get it—we get old school console, we get new school free-to-play for console, and it’s going to work and drive more revenue for those premium and AAA console games.

Jordan: 31:06

Well, the sports games are kind of leading the charge in that way. At least they’re doing sort of a premium plus, right?

Alfonzo: 31:11

Yes, yeah, exactly. But yeah, there’s still... you know, UI/UX is very new in games. I mean, you wouldn’t think so—you’d think it was very mature—but it’s very new. To the point where, you know, with 2K, it was really the first time they brought UI/UX in upfront, and it paid off with dividends. And so now they’re trying to adopt that.

Alfonzo: 31:33

That’s one of the things we really want to do—we want to see that process change industry-wide because we know it does work. And now we have some case studies to show how well it works, actually.

Jordan: 31:45

Nice. Well, thanks, Alfonzo, so much for coming on Playmakers. I think you gave us so much to think about, which is awesome. I think people should definitely check out your newsletter at uxmagicians.com and look forward to working together.

Alfonzo: 31:58

Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for your time. Love your show, and I look forward to seeing more great people on your show. Thank you so much.

Jordan: 32:08

I had a great time in that chat with Alfonzo. I hope you took a lot away from it. Alfonzo's work is incredible, and if you want to see his work or learn more about Alfonzo, head over to playmakerspodcast.com and in the episode notes, we will have links to his company and to him. You’ll be able to take a look at his work, get in touch with him, or get in touch with me. It’s all right there. Also, the links to any games that we talked about will be there as well. While you’re there, consider signing up for Playmakers Insiders—it’s where it’s at. We have a lot of fun on the show, and we have a lot of fun in the newsletter as well. That's it for this week. I'll see you next week with another great interview with an industry expert. You've been listening to Playmakers.