Kongregate
A social gaming startup chose Happy Cog to design a site calculated to excite savvy online game developers.
Venture-funded Kongregate had a brilliant go-to-market strategy: to become the first (and best) online gaming community that catered to game developers.
To achieve their vision, Kongregate needed a nimble design partner—one that could storyboard, conceptualize, rapidly prototype, and just as quickly revise. The design partner had to think like a gamer and behave like a new product developer—for they would be shaping a product, not just designing a site. Kongregate chose us and we got moving.
Into action
Key members of Happy Cog’s Philadelphia office jetted off to San Francisco to brainstorm with a select group in the founder’s apartment. We took tons of notes, and threw out bunches of ideas. Some stuck, some vaporized. There was no developed brand to work from, no message or statement to use as a baseline. There was only the idea that Kongregate had to win game developers’ love.
Back on the East Coast, we put pen to paper and noses to grindstones. We identified functionality that would be useful, and made conscious decisions to avoid extraneous “nice to haves.” By focusing on what was needed, we were able to quickly develop and present bold concepts for the site—concepts that maximized both visual impact and usability.
Users Bring Change
Once a design was settled upon, we constructed semantically-sound, lightweight XHTML and CSS templates for unique pages the site would serve. The site launched to a limited Alpha audience, then to an expanded Beta audience. Over the next few months, we worked with Kongregate to continually massage the design based upon user feedback.
We also worked with a growing number of newly-hired Kongregate developers, accommodating their needs while ensuring that our early goals and objectives were not compromised. While we followed our core design process for the early part of the engagement, our ability to adapt and respond to Kongregate’s changing needs is finally what meant the most to the client.
Today Kongregate is self-powered. You might say they took the best of our ideas and their own and ran with them. The site changes almost daily, sometimes in ways that surprise us. One thing’s for sure: in a supercharged, almost insanely competitive market, Kongregate has an edge, and we helped them find it.
Responsibilities
Research and development, concept storyboarding, information architecture, brand design and consulting, graphic design, user interface design, CSS/XHTML template development. Launched 14 October 2006.