Adidas: XBox 20th Anniversary
Adidas created a virtual drop experience with XBox to embrace the nostalgia of waiting in line for a new game drop or the latest hype sneakers, all through your phone! In the NeverPlayedOut Experience users could scroll to win exclusive prizes and see the shoe reveal.
The Concept
Adidas Originals and Xbox come together in an unexpected collaboration to commemorate the 20 anniversary of Xbox. Our project goal was to produce a disruptive, nostalgic, and buzzworthy reveal moment for the Xbox 360 Forum Mid. The creative team came with the concept of a mobile-only scrolling experience with a final shoe reveal at the end to simulate the nostalgia of waiting on the lines to buy a new console like back in the 2000s.
UX Goals
What defined success to my UX Work
Engaging Experience
The creative team came with the scrolling concept, a fun game type experience. As a UX Designer I wanted to increase moments of engagement for users and explore common gaming mechanics from the 2000s XBox to create recognition and nostalgia for users.
Clear Documentation
As the project had a short timeline, UX had to ensure a clear user experience for creatives, developers and stakeholders - including a clear documentation of all mechanics to be used in the experience. Figma was a key tool for the team's collaboration.
Enjoyable Journey
For the experience to be successfull we need to ensure a enjoyable journey for users that they could share across social media and make the NeverPlayedOut viral. UX worked side by side with Creative to produce a unique experince to meet client's expectations.
Initial Research
Exploring Opportunities
To gather information around how long users commonly scroll in the internet I did a research to on mobile user behavior. The average person in 2021 spent 108 minutes, or 6,480 seconds per day scrolling through social media. Creating moments of direct interaction was key to make users want to keep moving forward during our game experience.
User Flow
Main UX Deliverable
The main UX deliverable for this project was to produce a complete user flow of the experience, provinding a strong documentation and guidelines for the creative to produce the final designs of the screens. I also was responsible to present this flow for the main stakeholders on the Adidas team to get final approval. To produce this flow I used UX Heuristics to support basic user-game interactions such as constant feedback and a quick tutorial to make users familiar with the mechanics we choose.
Supporting Development
To support the development work, UX was also responsible to write Jira tickets for each one the mechanics we had in the experience. In that way, UX could ensure that the work approved in the concept phase was rolling out to development. This also helps developers to get focused only on the coding - and not having to go back and forth consulting designers about expected behaviours for the pieces they were producing.
The Result
The NeverPlayedOut expedience was a complete success for both Adidas and XBox, making the Forum Mid XBox 360 launch popular. The experience combined multiple interaction mechanics such as tap and hold to reveal hidden words, hidden prizes in glowing windows and achievements that could be shared across social media.
What I've learned?
To produce a successful collaborative work we must always make sure that our messaging is coming across. The importance of producing a consistent documentation for larger groups was key to make this project successful. I've also improved my presentation skills when presenting to Adidas stakeholder team and my ticket writing skills when dealing with developers and technical peers.
