Cats N Soup — Kanteya

CATS & SOUP

User Experience Reseach
January 2023

DELIVERABLES

Research
Case Study
Prototyping

LOCATION

Srishti Manipal Institute
Bangalore, India

Year 2 / UX Project

‘Cats & Soup’ is an indie mobile game revolving around collecting adorable cats in a virtual forest. These cats use a variety of ingredients to make different kinds of soup, which you can sell to earn rewards. It also offers numerous features allowing you to play with your cats, feed them, and accessorize them to boost certain abilities.

Despite its well-designed gameplay and unique aesthetic, our group identified a few accessibility issues and thought of changes to enhance the user experience. By addressing all these concerns, the game can become even more enjoyable for players of all abilities.

USER PERSONAS —

We asked couple of our friends who regularly enjoy this game, to let us interview them about the game and how they feel about playing it.

Understanding all the problems they face, we decided to map it down and improve the user flow to better suit gameplay and to make it less complicated.

Taking into consideration the desired appearance and flow of the observatory and bulletin board, we conducted a series of tests, ranging from user testing and heuristic evaluation to comparing the UIs of different competitors.

We compiled a list of pain points and, based on that, engaged in a small exercise called 'Crazy 8', during which we attempted to identify as many problems and solutions as possible within 8 minutes. This exercise yielded numerous ideas and significantly facilitated the redesign process.

Before starting to create the wireframes, we analyzed how other indie game studios created their task flows and interfaces. This research proved to be helpful when we were developing the high-fidelity model later on.

Considering all of our pain points, we also created a few basic wireframe mockups to show how the revamped interface will look before moving on to a higher fidelity prototype.

PROTOTYPE —
We proceeded to develop one using Figma, as it provided amazing tools to recreate the interface to its truest form. Here are a few images of the redesigned UI.

We tested the prototype with a few users as well as the users from our personas and received positive feedback, along with a few suggestions for minor tweaks and changes. Overall, the users felt that the changes we made improved the accessibility of the product, including condensing excessive information, adjusting icon and text size, and enhancing the flow of the interface, making it more enjoyable.