Custom spin the wheel design choices for better KPIs

Resources Custom spin the wheel design choices for better KPIs

Random prize wheels are one of the most visually engaging instant win mechanisms available to businesses through gamification platforms.

Whether you’re targeting customers or employees, the random wheel picker is a widely understood game mechanic that’s instantly recognisable by its distinctive design set-up.

It therefore follows that for your custom spin the wheel game to be as good as it can possibly be, and achieve the best possible KPIs, you need to go full force on the graphic design front to deliver a great looking end product.

Understanding the impact of good custom spin the wheel designs on KPIs

If you open a shop to sell premium specialist products but use odds and ends from old shops for its infrastructure and displays, and you merchandise everything in bins and on the floor, it’s going to devalue your brand, and turn off potential customers.

Similarly, if a movie studio scrimps on the visual effects and overall production values of a film, it’s going to let down the very medium.

The visuals of your custom spin the wheel, which is a highly animated gamification experience that distributes prizes at random, can be the very reason potential customers play your game. The branding and the start screen image – before they can even commit to a spin – could deter them if it isn’t on brand and attractive looking.

Consider this: When a marketing email looks subpar for the brand sending it, customers are way less likely to interact with it for fear of it being nefarious.

When you factor in that typically, on the second screen of your game, before the spinning wheel, you’re asking for personal information in your wheel’s data collection form, you know that every screen of your game needs to look great.

Defining key performance indicators (KPIs) for random digital prize wheels

When you use the spin the wheel template on the Drimify gamification platform, you’re getting native statistics and data generated within your app to compare against external KPIs (such as sales, codes redeemed, or social media impact).

Your wheel spinner game will generate statistics for:

You will also see statistics for leads and session duration, among others that are less pertinent when it comes to what you can impact through design.

Key design choices to maximise your spin the wheel’s impact

Ultimately, an attractive and well designed random picker wheel or prize wheel game can maximise the number of views that get turned into engagements and completions.

What the user sees when they view the start screen needs to be great – and so does every screen of your wheel game thereafter to minimise drop-off. The random wheel is a short and direct experience, so there’s no margin for subpar graphics.

Here, we’ll go through the key principles to think about when designing your prize wheel, or creating the brief for your spin the wheel to share with your graphic designers.

Colours and branding consistency

Let’s pretend for a second that you come across a Coca Cola spin the wheel game that ties into their Christmas campaign with either the trucks or the polar bears, with the big prize being a holiday in Lapland.

A cool way to theme it would be to use Drimify’s video background functionality to set an animation of an icy wind, or snow falling, or even an iceberg being chipped to make ice cubes, with Coca Cola being poured over it. Now, imagine that the frame of the prize wheel is blue and the button is green. Imagine that the start screen didn’t feature the Coca Cola logo, nor any red or white and the white ribbon that swirls across multipacks and bottles.

Suddenly it doesn’t feel very Coca Cola, and there are two potential points of disconnect, both on the start screen, and the wheel itself, where users might drop out – hitting both the engagement rate and the completion rate.

Brand identity is powerful, so use it in your spin the wheel games while playing around with the theme of the campaign.

Drimify’s spin the wheel maker gives you multiple opportunities to brand your whole prize wheel experience to make it recognisable to your audience and distinctive to new targets.

Learn from bad adverts: Ever watch a really compelling car commercial or perfume ad that sticks with you, but you never quite figure out what it was selling? Everyone has. Film can get lost in the arty heritage of its own medium, but marketing games shouldn’t suffer from this hang up.

You’ll get zero marks for subtlety when designing your custom spin the wheel game, and this will be reflected in your KPIs.

Wheel segment customisation and prize visual options

This is a biggie.

Sometimes, it’s better to represent a prize on a spin the wheel game than to offer up a real life image or photo-realistic rendering.

Let’s say you have eight different prizes. The top prize is a parachuting experience, and one of the mid-tier prizes is a backpack. How weird to see the promotional image of someone jumping out of a plane in one segment of the wheel, and just a marketing photo of a backpack on another. It’s like seeing Batman and the sun together – kind of silly. They don’t belong in the same frame.

Using icons, or illustrations, allows you to deliver a consistent visual scheme to the user experience (UX).

Drimify also allows you to define the colour of segment backgrounds, so you could upload your icons or illustrations for the segments on a transparent background, and let the spin the wheel generator fill in the colours in a way that’s aesthetically pleasing.

Picker or prize wheel segment colours

You can pick colour one and colour two, and the spin the wheel generator will automatically make the wheel go, for example: blue-red-blue-red, so you won’t get a random spot where there are two red backgrounds.

Assuming your wheel frame and button, and some or all of your background are in your brand colours, you need to pick two wheel segment colours that don’t clash with the existing scheme, nor with each other.

If your branding is very bright and colourful, this might be a good opportunity to use monochrome tones to not distract from those, or if your brand’s quite dark, it’s the perfect place to inject a dash of vibrancy for a more attention grabbing design.

Videos and animation options for more visually dynamic prize spinner games

Drimify’s custom prize wheel builder allows for video backgrounds.

For best results here, you want to think about what’s going to work for a spin the wheel background. A movie clip would be a weird choice, as all the action will be obscured by the wheel and it’ll be distracting. The wheel is the star, afterall.

You also need to bear in mind that it will loop, so something consistent works really well. Think fog, think snow, think electricity, think soundwaves. A video template edited with your content can also be a strong design choice to make it even more relevant to your brand and your project.

Pro tip: The preview button on Drimify’s spin the wheel builder will be a constant friend here, as you’re introducing more moving pieces to your game (literally), and you need to make all the elements work with the video background.

Analysing design choices by other brands (in and out of your industry)

If you really want to gamify like a pro with your spin the wheel games – especially on a design front – you need to be a student of the game.

Play every spin the wheel or other marketing game that comes into your orbit to see what they’re doing. You might be in the sports marketing industry, but see something cool on a gamification experience inside the cinema loyalty app you’re signed up for that gives you an idea.

Your industry might be underusing a digital tactic like gamification and spin the wheel instant wins, so you need to work laterally to see what you can take and apply from elsewhere to get ahead of your competition.

Key takeaways for designing the best possible custom spin the wheel

Ultimately, a random spin the wheel game is a marriage of graphic design and effective copy, adapted around a premade game engine, with all the custom options configured to fulfil a specific purpose, whether that’s promoting a new product, attempting to cultivate loyalty among customers, or rewarding employees.

From a graphic design for marketing standpoint, the usual rules apply:

The better it looks, the more likely customers or employees will play it, and the more likely people will be to share it on social media.

A game changer when building your prize wheel on Drimify, if possible: Give your graphic designer access to your spin the wheel generator when building the game, so they can see what works as they go.

This won’t always be possible due to permissions and working through agencies, but it really can shorten feedback loops as they can cast their designer’s eye over the custom spin the wheel as it’s built, and potentially deliver the project more efficiently.

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