Scrabulous: Combining Seamless Pathways with Absorbing Content
January 10, 2008
Ozan Onay of Viral Networks just completed a Case Study of Scrabulous. For those unfamiliar, Scrabulous is a popular Facebook application that mimics the original board game, Scrabble, as developed by Hasbro.
Scrabulous, which ranks #9 on Adonomics’ active users leaderboard and is valued at over US$2,000,000, did not begin as a Facebook application. It was first a freestanding Web game with only 20,000 users, which later that broke into Facebook following the Platform’s initial launch, evolving into what it is today with nearly 1 million users.
Touching on topics such as functionality, features, sensationalism, and “virality”, Onay offers many solid points that demonstrate what Scrabulous is doing right and what the developers behind Scrabulous could be doing better. Primarily, the article proposes the use of a “functional, simple, streamlined, quick, [and] communicative” design for the landing page, with more “sensation-focused, feature-rich, dense, prolonged, engrossing” factors taken into account nearer to the heart of the application.
Onay’s case study concludes by pointing out the need for the minds behind Scrabulous to redesign various components in order to both improve its user experience and promote its viral features in an effort to push it beyond its recent “flat period”.
(Read the full case study here.)
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Hi Matt, thanks for the write-up.
It’s good to see that facebook developers are interested in the blog - it’ll certainly encourage me to keep writing developer-oriented posts in the future.