All Options – Strike! – a challenging game that tests your trading skills

Employer: Info.nl
Year: 2009
Role: creative lead, interaction designer
Deliverables: game concept, IxD
Methods: brainstom sessions with client and target groups, sketching

The goal
Create brand awareness amongst potentially new traders and test their trader skills.

The research & the game
Obviously we needed to find out what a trader does in his job. What does he do all day while staring at 3 or 4 screens filled with numbers? What makes a good trader? What makes them tick? What are the traders like at All Options? To find out we held dozens of interviews with junior, medior and senior traders as well as trader trainees. These sessions helped us identifying five skills a potential trader must possess: mental speed, superb memory, basic trading knowledge, the right attitude and great numeracy. There you have it. Next step was to translate these five to game play elements. One important thing: the game had to be one hard son of a b**** to play. Because we were dealing with smart (mostly) fellas here. After testing the first release amongst traders we heard it was too simple. No problem: we auto generated harder math questions and speeded things up a bit. The result is a game I can’t play myself but which has received great critics from the target audience.

Facebook integration
To boost the viral effect and make life easier for our players, we used Facebook Connect to challenge your friends. Posting scores to Facebook walls, adding extra features when doing so and showing your friends-ranking greatly helped to raise Strike! awareness around the web. And of course adding a ‘Post to Twitter’ option wasn’t a bad decision either.

A cool fact: the winner of the first prize period had such a outstanding high sore, All Options offered him a job. The dude is now a trader at All Options.