Domino’s UX Strategy
Engaging gamers as an audience
My role: Sr Experience Designer
Accomplishments: Twitch bot ordering integration; St. Jude livestream events, overall brand / gamer strategy established for CPB/Domino’s
Skills utilized: Product design, UX design, wireframing, IA, creative collaboration
Tools: Figma
Brands face an uphill battle when interacting with the gaming community. There have been some serious missteps that shattered trust, so we (CPB & Domino’s) had our work cut out for us.
How is this related to user experience? We can build an app, a website, or even a self driving delivery vehicle, but we still need a strategy for approaching our users. Where are they? How will we reach them? When will we reach them? What do we want them to do? Marketing and traffic can handle some of the segmentation work, but the strategy is what will help identify value for the gamer and make sure we deliver a meaningful experience.
I led talks with Twitch to explore partnerships between Domino’s and the streaming giant.
I championed ideas that would bring value to both brand and gamer, choosing to build a relationship vs a flash in the pan marketing stunt.
I worked closely with creatives to make sure we aligned on a vision for this audience.
It starts by earning trust with the gaming community by showing you understand your place in their lives. Food is life, and pizza has been the easiest go-to food for gamers. Totino’s Pizza Rolls, for example, have had incredible success marketing to this segment over the years. They are aware that their product means gamers have to get up fewer times for meal breaks (we can talk about the health effects later). Less time with meal prep = more time for gaming.
Pie pizza is just slightly more involved, but still has that convenience and nostalgia factor working for it. That’s great, so how do we connect this to Domino’s? It starts with business goals, and working that into experiences that meet gamers where they’re at. That earned credibility gives you a seat at the table to share more of your brand. And speaking of business goals, Domino’s wanted to sell pizzas (no brainer there) vs just tossing cash at gamers, so I needed to present solutions that ultimately drove sales.
I needed to identify the various ways to bridge gamers to pizza sales, which led to the question: How do we meet them in their world?
I helped conceptualize ways we could reach gamers where they’re at, utilizing Domino’s existing digital infrastructure where possible to meet business goals. Fortunately we had an ordering API to work with that was designed to do just that. See my work with Domino’s AnyWare for some more examples, but this allowed us to imagine any number of ways to order pizza through Domino’s.
DEVICES
One of the most sold consoles of all time meant we’d reach a lot of gamers with a PS4 ordering app. Especially one that wouldn’t interrupt the gaming flow.
Tap the Home button -> Open the Domino’s app -> Place your Easy Order. Three steps to get pizza headed towards your front door, complete with tracking notifications that won’t interrupt your play. You’ll know exactly when it’s time to hit the pause button.
STREAMERS AND THEIR AUDIENCES
I worked on various Twitch integrations across multiple layers to reward streamers for promoting Domino’s and viewers for ordering Domino’s. Driving orders was the primary business goal here, but there was another business involved here that had input: Twitch was looking for ways to innovate with their chat. Fortunately the same people that brought the world emoji ordering were well equipped to bring something great to that space.
Order Domino’s directly in Twitch Chat. Utilizing a key feature in Twitch to not only easily order pizza, but also let your fellow viewers know. We wanted to integrate this with a kickback program for the streamer so they would get rewarded with every order. Of course there’s any number of ways to order Domino’s as well, but here we leverage the sense of community and celebration that allows everyone to engage with the brand on their own time (or hunger level).
COMMUNITY
Community might be the most important aspect of understanding and targeting this audience. A vast majority of gamers are social, interacting with their various communities for a variety of reasons. Streaming platforms like Twitch and YouTube are avenues brands are most familiar with (i.e. broadcast content), but each offers additional ways to engage with the audiences like in the ordering bot example above.
As a part of a holistic strategy with gamers, I also wanted to make sure we were addressing the community aspect of gamers. One of the easiest ways is a sponsorship through Twitch. Appealing to both the streamer and Twitch, but trickier with Domino’s. I still needed to drive orders.
Rising Star Streamer was a concept designed to work in tandem with other concepts to do just that. Streamers would be supported by Domino’s, with other initiatives like chatbot ordering and kickback payout to create a scenario where everyone wins out.
Bounty Boards with Twitch was another avenue to encourage this symbiosis, utilizing all the tools above to implement reusable, easy-to-implement, and easy to track ROI events. Streamers pick up “quests” within their Twitch dashboard and fulfill the objectives (like generate 100 orders on your streams this week) to receive their reward.
ByteNyte was a creative concept built around celebrating the victory moment in gaming. And what better way to celebrate than with free pizza?! I worked on user flow exploration to help us understand how we would handle our profiled users, from signup, to reward delivery.
I’m proud of this work for taking both sides of the relationship into consideration. Gamers deserve to feel valued, and a brand like Domino’s isn’t just going to toss cash around because they were told that they should market to gamers. This was used to walk client through creative ideas backed by business logic to support. Ultimately this is the type of work I enjoy.
Team: Victor Won, Kelly McCormick, D’arcy O'Neil