Moshi Monsters

TL;DR

I designed games and updates for millions of kids playing Moshi Monsters. I worked on all aspects of the online game including community tools and the main website. Later my focus shifted to imagining the future of Moshi Monsters on mobile.

What I did

In my time at Mind Candy I was involved in a wide variety of projects, I started working on community tools, helping to make the task of moderating 80m kids more efficient. Later I worked on revamping the website and the core UI of the game including registration. The bulk of my time was designing and prototyping mobile versions of Moshi Monsters which were unfortunately never released - but i learnt a lot about product management and game design. After working on Moshi Monsters I moved onto PopJam, a creative community for kids.

An interesting challenge when working on the UX for the main game was balancing the ease-of-use with the fun - part of the success of Moshi Monsters was exploring the game and discovering exciting new areas that weren’t necessarily obvious. Another important aspect was ensuring that we’re designing what the kids actually want, and dealing with the specifics of designing kids products (safety, regulations etc).

Game UI

Working with Ram Kanda and James Kirkwood we worked to improve the Moshi Monsters UI. Key areas of focus were to allow players to access core functionality across the whole game (before it was restricted to their room), create a new way to message players, and re-design the main navigation to remove confusing around accessing your room.

Key issues:

• Social features could only be accessed from the player’s room
• No way to message players of new updates/ features other than multiple pop-ups
• In the top navigation it wasn’t clear how to get back to your room (the house icon by the username)
• Map didn’t feature any indications of where you could go or what was There

Updated UI

The new updated UI kept to the fun aesthetic of Moshi while making tweaks to make the game easier to play and created new tools for the developers to surface new content and events within the game. The frame and background was also updated to match the rich graphics found in the game.

Secret codes

This was a short but fun project, working with Ram Kanda as the UI designer. Players could be awarded secret codes from competitions and physical toys, but the only way to enter the codes was by logging out and adding it on the login page. This could be frustrating if you had multiple codes and didn’t offer any feedback as to whether your code was successful or what you received. There was also confusion between membership codes which offered a set period of premium access and secret codes as these were technically different systems.

Key issues:

• Had to log out to enter a secret code
• No way to navigate to entering a code from the game
• No feedback whether the code was successful or not
• Difficult to enter multiple codes in one session
• Confusion between secret codes and membership codes

Secret Codes - IGGY edition

We redesigned secret codes to have their own page that could be accessed from within the game. This gave users a consistent place to access it. We wanted to make the experience of unlocking a secret code fun so we designed it around a popular Moshling - Iggy. After you enter a code Iggy eats the code and returns the reward (or spits it out if it’s not valid), this ensures that players always know what they unlocked with their code. To reduce confusion with membership codes, we have a link in the top right to prompt users to the correct location.