A shop the live ops team could run

Hungry Shark World's shop still used the fixed layouts from its 2016 launch. The live operations team needed to run a wider range of promotions, but changing an offer often required developer support.

I redesigned the shop around reusable offer blocks. The team could change promotions themselves, using large featured offers alongside smaller bundles within the existing game.

The redesigned promotions tab with a large shark offer beside a smaller gem offer — The redesigned promotions tab puts a large featured offer for a new shark beside a smaller offer for gems.

Following the redesign, purchase conversion rose 6% and average revenue per player rose 9%.

The old shop

Offers were hard-coded, so a campaign change could become an engineering task. The fixed layout also limited which bundles the team could feature and how prominently they could appear.

Players saw the same offers regardless of progress or purchase history. The team needed to vary bundles for different groups and adjust them as campaigns changed.

The 2016 shop's gold tab with a row of fixed gold packs and separate tabs for gems and free stuff — The 2016 shop sorted gold, gems and free rewards into fixed tabs, each with its own row of set packs.

01Fixed offersBundles could not be tailored to different player groups.
02Poor discoverabilityThe shop was buried in the game's menus.
03Engineering dependencyCampaign changes competed with other development work.

Offer blocks

I designed reusable blocks for currencies, sharks, pets and bundles, working within the existing game.

Economy designers could combine blocks into promotions and update the content without asking Engineering to rebuild the screen.

Diagram of the new shop structure: a promotions tab with one big offer block and two small ones, then soft currency, hard currency and ads — The promotions tab combines a featured block with smaller offers, followed by gold, gems and ads.

Shop layout

Before: fixed tabs and offers

Separate currency tabs spread offers across screens and limited control over what players saw first.

After: rearrangeable offers

I brought offers into a horizontally scrolling shop. The team could resize and rearrange blocks to give a promotion more space or bring it closer to the start.

The new shop scrolling sideways from a featured shark offer to a gem offer — The new shop scrolls sideways, starting with a featured offer for the Quantum shark.

Results

Campaign updates no longer required Engineering to rebuild the shop.

purchase conversion: +6%
revenue per player: +9%
revenue per paying player: +4%

Measure	Change
Overall revenue	+9%
Offer visibility	+15%
Time to purchase	−5.2 seconds
Promotion flexibility	3×
A/B testing speed	+180%
Developer work needed to change an offer	None

Reusable layouts made the shop easier to operate as well as easier to change: the team could run new offers without turning each campaign into a development task.