The Neopets
UX/UI Redesign
Redesigning a childhood classic
INTRODUCTION
Neopets was founded in 1999 as a virtual pet website. It quickly gained popularity, and by 2004 had over 25 million registered users.
Users could create and take care of their own virtual pets, called "Neopets," and customize them with clothing and accessories. Neopets also had a strong community aspect, with forums and guilds where users could connect with each other.
THE DECLINE
Neopets has faced a decline in interest over time, with some of its loyal userbase aging out of the target demographic.
The website has since struggled to keep up with changes in technology and evolving trends in gaming. As a result, many users have moved on to other virtual worlds and social media platforms. Despite this, it remains an important part of internet culture and a beloved childhood memory for many who grew up with the website.
THE CHALLENGE
A once popular franchise, now half in the grave.
Neopets now has less than 100,000 unique users, down from a high of 60 million in its hey day. Since its inception, it has changed parent companies 4 times. With each hand off, users expected new content, UX updates, a mobile version, but none of these improvements were ever made.
With no improvements to the game since the early 2000’s, a dwindling fanbase, and overall negative sentiment among its users, it is a prime candidate for a UX makeover.
UNDERSTANDING THE USER
The next steps for this project involve a deeper understanding of the Neopets userbase. According to available data, the majority of Neopets users have a fairly even gender distribution. Additionally, I found that Neopets users are also interested in other forms of media, such as gaming, animations, and comics.
A little more research uncovers some basic demographic statistics about the current userbase, revealing that a majority of users are ages 18-34.
This is somewhat surprising information, given that the Neopets franchise in its hey day was largely considered a children’s game, and marketed exclusively to kids.
While I had managed to gather some basic demographic information on Neopets users, it was clear that a deeper understanding was necessary. To achieve this, I conducted user interviews with a diverse range of Neopets users, asking for their thoughts on a surface level to get a general sentiment about their experience with Neopets.
Among the remaining userbase, general sentiment on the Neopets games and franchise is extremely negative.
This website is pretty much utterly pointless now. You can't do literally anything.
-MAMA357 (USER)
This website will be phased out any day now, and the Neopets franchise as we know it will be a compilation of games and apps that sustain subpar content. Bleak.
-EXTRAVAGLANCE (USER)
This is an embarassment. I’m at a loss for words… Neopets is rotting. Are they going to step up or just keep letting it decay?
-GLITCHDOG (USER)
It’s clear there is a gap between the userbase and how the game is marketted, and it’s clear that there is dissatisfaction among the remaining userbase about the direction of the game. Now, I needed a little more insight into what specifically about Neopets was frustrating its users.
USER INTERVIEWS
I compiled a list of questions to ask a variety of users. The purpose of these questions was to tease out a little more information about user trends and behaviors, who they are, why they play the game, and what they like and dislike about the game. I was also hopeful I would discover some common themes among complaints about the site, and identify some key areas for improvement.
Can you tell me a little about yourself?
How long have you been playing Neopets?
What originally got you interested in the game?
What do you like about the game?
What do you dislike about the game?
When and where do you typically use Neopets?
Outside of Neopets, what do you typically like to do in your free time?
I received responses from 13 individuals who were excited to volunteer, which gave me a starting place to start to identify some common user trends, beyond that of what I could piece together from analytic sites.
How long have you been playing Neopets?
What originally got you interested in Neopets?
What do you dislike about Neopets?
I then created a forum for open feedback about Neopets. I received responses from 147 individuals on their thoughts and hopes for the future of Neopets. Through talking with the users of the game, I identified two key areas of needed improvements.
1. The state of the website and UX issues surrounding the actual usability of the game
2. being the outdated game design and lacking updates from a content perspective.
For this project, I will be focusing on the first key area, and prioritize improving on the usability of the website, in a later project, I will revisit the game design. -- There are UI updates needed, game design updates needed, rehaul of communication from staff, and a relook at rules/marketing to better fit the current audience.
INVENTORY
The first feature I've taken an effort to redesign is the entire inventory system.
Neopets allows users to collect, trade, and sell items that can be used for various purposes across the game. Currently, the inventory system is split into 3 portions — the closet ( which holds clothing items ), the inventory ( which holds items for easy on-hand access ) and the Safety Deposit Box ( which is a safe of sorts, requiring a pin to access the items placed inside. Users often use the Safety deposit box to hold expensive or rare items ).
From my open forum for Neopets feedback, 40 individuals called out the inventory system specifically, I then parsed through the feedback to find what the biggest pain points with item management was.
The whole inventory and related pages needs a huge overhaul(…)it would be great to be able to do mass actions from the inventory screen itself, or send things to the SDB without going through the popup-dropdown-click thing.
-Anonymous user
You can't filter by NP/NC which makes it a pain to search sometimes if you know how the item looks, but don't remember the name. I usually just change the amount of items shown to 50 (max.) and then scroll through all the pages manually until I find it.
-Anonymous user
Main problems
No filter/search
No ability to categorize or create folders
Requires repetitive box checking for bulk actions
Refreshes page after each action
Difficult to manage hundreds-thousands of items
INVENTORY SYSTEM
INVENTORY REDESIGN
My solution includes one merged inventory system, instead of a separate inventory for closet, SDB, and main inventory.
Users will have the ability to create tabs that serve as “locked boxes”. Users will be able to better categorize items, and move items between custom boxes.
These locked boxes will serve all the same functions of an SDB, mainly protection from random events or accidental actions.
CREATING “LOCKED BOXES”
Users can create a box by clicking the + icon, and entering a custom name.
COMPLETING ITEM ACTIONS
Users can complete actions on single items, or on several items by checking the box to the left of each item. When a checkbox is selected, a toolbar at the bottom appears with the ability to do bulk actions like "add to shop", "add to gallery", "donate", etc.
A user can also "Select all" by checking the first checkbox in the header of the table.
MOVE ITEM TO LOCKED BOX
Once items have been selected, the table rows become draggable, and a user can drag these items to one of their locked boxes.
MOVE ITEM TO MAIN INVENTORY
When moving an item back to the Main Inventory, the user must enter their pin.
NAVIGATION
The second feature I've taken an effort to redesign is the entire navigation system.
Currently, Neopets is using a mix between two navigation systems. An old toolbar that appears on pages of Neopets that hasn’t been updated from the latest redesign ( which was only half implemented about 4 years ago ) and a toolbar that appears on the small percentage of pages that was updated.
As you may imagine, for users this has caused an extreme amount of frustration & confusion. Users have created their own way around this by bookmarking certain pages or googling pages of Neopets that they are looking for when needed.
This navigation is ridiculous. I don't even know how to find my "favourites," bank, stock market, etc. unless I happen to remember the URL.
-Anonymous user
There are lots of things I have 0 idea how to find and I just google them and find a link to jellyneo rather than the actual neopets website.
-Anonymous user
I don’t want to have to use 3rd party sites to have to navigate to these important places in addition to how I use them to get to my dailies and npc shops.
-Anonymous user
Main problems
User’s most commonly used pages not easily accessible
Search bar function does not work for finding pages
No bookmark function
Toolbar Navigation on unconverted pages- Expanded and Unexpanded
Toolbar Navigation that appears on converted pages - Expanded and Unexpanded
Sidebar Navigation that appears on converted pages - Expanded and Unexpanded
NAV REDESIGN
For the navigation, I wanted to condense the experience into one, cohesive navigation system that would appear across all pages.
It would work in two parts, one navbar with main categories like gaming, shopping, community, etc, and one pull out menu for specific links within those categories. This is where users should also be able to add bookmarks.
Visually, I structured it to be a left-side navbar, in a throwback to nostalgia from the original Neopets website, of which many players remember fondly.
Design inspiration — original Neopets layout with nostalgic left sidebar.
All expanded sidebar states
MESSAGING
Currently, Neopets offers users a way of private messaging each other called “Neomail”. The current neomail system is an extremely outdated mailbox type feature. Users have long expressed dissatisfaction with the system due to their being a short character limit, frequent malfunctions, no outbox, and no message chains.
I would LOVE a sent folder. No idea why it doesnt exist.
-Anonymous user
I sometimes need to see NMs I've sent (particularly when NC trading) and see that I've replied. Also, it'd be nice to have a higher message cap (or no message cap).
-Anonymous user
And an outbox would be so convenient - I've been taking screenshots of my neomails in order to remember what I sent!
-Anonymous user
Main problems
Frequent malfunctions
No outbox
Inability to search
No Message chains
Short character limit
