Memes up! Test your meme knowledge
Memes are more than ever before present everywhere and not just considered something very niche.
Regular media talk about it, some people became famous because they were turned into a meme, brands use it in marketing and so on, memes became a new genre of humor.
Memes are now so popular and became a part of today’s digital culture. Many people now send memes to their friends via their phones or computers and by sharing memes it also helps bonding with friends by having something everyone can like enjoy and share.
Just like when we were all kids and we would all play together, that reminds me of that conversation I had with an old friend.
Her name is Marie, she’s a 22 years old (so could be considered a Millenial or Generation Z for certain) student in tech in the US and as a child she loved to play board games with friends and family. It would bring them all together and they’d have fun game nights however as time passed they stopped playing as it is now seen as uncool and out of date.
She now has a solid group of friends and like I mentionned earlier they all share memes between themselves as it became part of today’s youth culture and Marie told me how nice it would be if they could have game nights like before but with memes involved.
She then started to talk to me about how she tried to find a board game about memes online, I made a transcription of what she said right below :
Looks like there’s not much available indeed.
When I asked her why a game app instead of a physical board game in the end, she replied that in the end physical board game are expensive, hard to carry with her but also game app tend to have paywalls and sometimes have too many complex rules.
I wondered if it was a problem other might have encountered, so I decided to put out a survey and interview people asking about their preferences in game & memes and their struggles. Heres what I found ;
- 60% of the persons in the survey & interviews are in their early 20's
- The most recurring pain points about the lack of meme themed games were the following ;
— having a paywall within the game
- having to pay to download the game
- game last too long
- rules are too complex - They like game that pin each other & create competition (for example Uno)
- 66% like game that are short (30mn max)
- 33% prefer game app because you can carry it everywhere
- 83% like humored game (for example Cards against humanity)
From all the informations I’ve gathered I drew the conclusion that millenials/Generation Z need a board game app with memes to play with friends because there’s few to none board game that appeal to millenials/generation Z humor. I believe that creating a board game app with the theme of memes for millenials and generation z will allow them to play game board more often by having a game that appeals to their type of humor.
So the majority said they liked humored game, that they liked game that pin each other & create competition and game that are short. So, what now ?
Some of you may know about it already but there is a game about memes that exist already called “What do you meme” and its rules and principle are directly based off of the game “Cards against humanity” but instead of filling a blank space by a phrase you are supposed to find the best caption for a meme.
By taking the same rules but making it your own and adapt it people will already know how to play your game or will be at least familiar with the concept so I figured I could try and make my own version of a game I could adapt.
Since so many people from the survey and interview stated they prefered shorter game I decided when doing the MoSCoW method to have a timer in-game as a must have and for the concept of the game app I thought how the game called “Time’s Up” is easy to understand and could be applied and adapted to a meme game.
For those who don’t know Time’s Up is a game where you are in a team and you have to make your team guess a character you picked from a pile within a time frame. You have three rounds and each round has its own rule. First round you can describe the character without naming it, second round you can only say one word about it and third round you can only mime it.
From there and before I started to sketch out some concept I did the user flow that you can check out here.
As you can see on the draft I was trying to figure out how the user could tell the app they wanted to pass a meme or tell the app their team guessed a meme right.
At first I wanted to use the fact that a smartphone has a position sensors so the user would swipe the phone to the right to mark the meme as guessed right and to the left as passing the meme.
One big thing about UX is testing and thankfully I tested the idea with several potential users but that just wasn’t it. Mostly because of the way the user hold the phone horizontally when actually playing a game it wouldn’t be natural to titlt the phone like that in that case so I tested out a guessed right button on the right and a pass button on the left of the screen and when testing it out it went smoother and it was easier for the users to understand.
After some more testing and going back and forth with the design I completed the prototype for Memes Up!
Note: Once you sign in a friend of your is scanning your QR Code to join your game and the prototype is from his phone point of view.
To end this medium article, I’d say again that it was a fun project to work on and something I actually wish to develop into a real app if I ever have the opportunity to learn how to develop an iOS app, it was also a challenge to stay consistent on the appearance of the buttons as I hand drew all of the icons and small illustrations, it needed to make sense. Testing it with my colleagues from my bootcamp at the time was really interesting as each one of them had a different experience with meme, some were more familiar with it than other.
Thank you for reading 🤠
