Problem Discovery
🔍 Falling Short on Organic Growth and Social Engagement
Due to Apple’s App Tracking Transparency policy (IDFA), reaching the right audience through paid user acquisition had become significantly harder and more expensive. Without user-level tracking, our ability to target high-value players was limited. We needed a feature that could increase our K-factor: the rate at which players invite others to join organically.
The assumption: stronger social connections in-game would drive retention and encourage organic sharing.
Apple’s IDFA policy limits tracking, making it harder and more expensive for game developers to target the right players with ads.
✨ Building a Warm, Social Player Experience
We saw an opportunity to make Garden Joy feel more like a shared experience. Inspired by cozy, emotionally rewarding games like Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp and Pokémon GO, we aimed to create warm, low-pressure social interactions that help players feel connected through simple, meaningful moments with friends.
Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp’s friends feature fosters emotional connection through simple, low-pressure, asynchronous social play.
Proposed Solution
🚀 Centralizing Social Gifting into a Core Loop Surface
We reimagined Friends as a system centered around daily gifting and rewarding reciprocity. The core mechanic works like this:
Players earn Friend Gifts via gameplay, purchases, or free drops.
Gifts must be sent to friends. They can’t be opened by the sender.
When received, a gift becomes a golden ticket.
Collect 15 tickets to automatically trigger a spin of the Wheel of Prizes.
Players can spin only up to once per day, with spins triggered automatically to prevent hoarding.
This mechanic encouraged players to gift proactively and created a built-in rhythm for return engagement.
Early feature concepts showing an interactive friend list where players send gifts that turn into golden tickets, leading to spins on the Wheel of Prizes.
Another concept explored letting players feature a favorite design for friends to interact with and send reactions. It was ultimately discarded due to a lack of meaningful incentives for player engagement.
Constraints and Challenges
🧪 Balancing Simplicity with Novel Mechanics
One key challenge wasn’t technical. It was teaching an unfamiliar mechanic in a familiar, low-effort way. Users expect to open gifts, but here they send them, earn tickets, then spin a prize wheel.
We had to:
Design tooltips and labels that clarified directionality without overwhelming
Use visuals (e.g. icons, streaks, timers) to imply flow and progression
Avoid cognitive overload, especially for an audience that skews older and more casual
The goal was to strike a balance between intuitive visuals and minimal guidance.
We explored various ways to show gift-sending streaks. While numbers and icons offered a cleaner look, we prioritized clarity over minimalism to better suit our older, casual player base.
Designing the Experience
✅ Final Design
The final design, featuring an interactive friends list for sending and claiming gifts, a Wheel of Prizes, and a concise tutorial pop-up.
🌿 Gifting in Context
We moved gifting directly into each friend tile, surfacing:
Gifting buttons with clear states (e.g. available, cooldown, full)
A visual streak indicator always visible under the button
Tooltip support to explain gift limits, cooldowns, and progression
The friend tile features distinct visual states, paired with brief tooltips that explain its current status.
🎈 The Wheel & Ticket Loop
To add delight and drive daily return behavior, we gamified gifting with:
Tickets earned through giving/receiving gifts
A wheel mechanic that rewarded players with randomized prizes
A counter and animation system to encourage collection and return
The friends list footer tracks and displays progress toward earning your next spin.
Reaching 15 tickets triggers the Wheel of Prizes automatically.
✨ Entry, Invitations & Onboarding
We also redesigned:
A combined Add Friends + Pending Invitations pop-up with smart badging
A new user flow (NUF) with screen overlays and tooltips guides users when they unlock the feature for the first time
A sorting system in the friends list that prioritized players with active streaks or gifts to claim
We streamlined every tap to make it easier to get started and more rewarding to stay connected.
The NUF features a brief explanation pop-up, a guiding tooltip, and lets players spin the wheel.
The “Add Friends” pop-up includes “Add Friends” and “Requests” tabs, and features a Designer ID that lets players quickly add each other as friends.
Outcome & Results
📊 Metrics
The feature led to a noticeable increase in player regularity among those who used the Friends system.
We saw higher week-over-week engagement in players with active gifting streaks
Increased use of the Add Friends button and invitation flow, indicating growth in organic sharing
While I can’t share exact figures, we saw encouraging signs that the feature helped support our goal of improving K-factor and driving organic growth through player-to-player invites.
🌟 Impact
Improved player sentiment around social connection
Positive feedback about the reward loop and gifting animations
Kept players coming back daily with small rewards and streak incentives.
The feature helped establish a social habit loop in a previously solo experience, with lightweight accountability, helping players form habits without pressure
We saw very positive feedback when the feature was launched, captured in the Garden Joy Official Community on Facebook.
Reflection & Takeaways
⚖️ Designing for Social is Designing for Systems
Unlike UI-focused features, social mechanics have ripple effects across player behavior, content pacing, and product strategy. This project pushed me to think more about reciprocity, timing, and incentive structures as core UX considerations.
🚀 Feature Work with Lifecycle Impact
Friends wasn’t just a quality-of-life update. It reshaped how players enter, return to, and stay connected to Garden Joy. It showed me how small, consistent behaviors like gifting can anchor long-term retention when supported by the right UX.
This case reinforced my belief that well-designed social systems aren’t just features. They’re engagement engines.