Designing your custom online jigsaw puzzle for best results
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The customisable online jigsaw puzzle is one of the most visually compelling gamification experiences available.
Whether for marketing, or for internal communications like HR or employee experience (EX) campaigns, it allows you to craft what is essentially an interactive, highly engaging reveal.
It’s a digital unveiling built on the well established mechanics of the classic jigsaw, but like anything worth doing, there are levels to effective jigsaw creation.
In this article, we’re going to go through the keys to success when it comes to customising and designing your online jigsaw puzzle to create a compelling and premium feeling user journey.
Key elements of a successful jigsaw puzzle design
This is not an exhaustive list of what goes into the design of effective jigsaw puzzles for overcoming business challenges, but can be looked at as fairly broad guidance which if all ticked, creates the most fortuitous circumstances to deliver a good user experience (UX) and get the best possible KPIs as a result.
We’re also framing this advice around customising your jigsaw puzzle on the Drimify gamification platform, as we’ve built this with businesses in mind. However, these principles will translate to help you design your puzzle no matter the platform.
Choosing the right image for your audience
You know when you buy a jigsaw puzzle from a store, what is it that makes you buy it? It’s the image on the box, right? Ultimately, a jigsaw puzzle, be it in physical form or online, is a picture or a photo (or in the case of the first ever jigsaw puzzle, a map).
Whether your custom jigsaw puzzle is a marketing game or something for internal communications, or even an educational puzzle, you need to build it around a visual that is:
- Beautifully designed and aesthetically pleasing (this is non-negotiable): So either use a professional graphic designer or the work of your professional photographer/ photo editing person. It’s worth getting a freelancer for this if you don’t have the in-house expertise as this is really your whole game and experience. You always want a premium feeling and looking gamification experience, but with custom puzzles, the importance of designing something premium is elevated.
- Relevant to your audience and relevant to your goal: Gamification isn’t just entertaining people through play, and by the same logic, a gamified online jigsaw isn’t just inviting people to re-assemble a pretty picture – it’s got to serve your goal. Whether it’s revealing your new branding, or an image that features your product in an interesting way, make sure it tells your story and is unique to your project.
There really is nothing more important in your game than getting the picture (or pictures if your jigsaw puzzle has multiple levels) right.
They need to look great, and they need to serve your purpose – for example, it it’s an online puzzle for a Christmas campaign, it’ll need to factor the festive season into its design somehow. A picture paints a thousand words so make sure they’re the right words for your project.
Setting the difficulty level: Appropriate puzzle piece numbers
Second to the actual content of the image is the complexity of the puzzle.
Think about how classic, physical jigsaws are marketed after the main image is displayed on the box. What are people looking at when they’re considering which ones to buy? After the designs of the puzzles, it’s the sizes. How many pieces is the puzzle made up of?
Here, you need to consider:
- The number of pieces, or “size” of your custom puzzle: When customising your puzzle on Drimify, you can go as simple as four puzzle pieces, to as complex as 64 puzzle pieces, with the max for still being mobile friendly being 25 pieces. When defining this you need to think about your audience, the device type they’re using, and the context – is this for learning, or is it supposed to be a fun, quick marketing game?
- The number of levels: You can make your online puzzle game as many levels long as you like, meaning you can essentially have unlimited puzzles to be played sequentially. You could look to gradually increase the number of pieces from level to level so it’s increasingly more challenging – for example: level one eases them in and lets them get used to the interface, but level three is where they prove themselves.
- Allow level skips: You can opt to let participants skip a level if they’re struggling to solve the puzzle. They won’t earn any points for this, but it allows them to progress to your end screen. It may be appropriate to allow this in a marketing game or as part of a larger gamification experience so they can get to the end screen, or advance to the next level, but as part of an educational project or an internal comms project, it might make more sense to make players solve each puzzle.
- Allow level previews: This gives participants the option to bring up a visual of the image they’re trying to solve. This will likely be necessary for more complex images, but unnecessary for four-piece levels.
Ultimately an online jigsaw puzzle that’s too “big” or complex will stop being fun and result in low completion rates, while puzzles that are too simple won’t generate quite as much focus.
This is why testing with a group of people is important, as you can get a better idea of if you’re on the right track or not.
You will also have extensive data from your jigsaw puzzle if you customise it using Drimify, so over time, from project to project, you can assess the level of difficulty that works best for your audience.
For example, if your custom puzzles are consistently getting engagement rates of 80%, you know the design aspects are right. However, if your 16-puzzle piece experiences are getting 30% completion rates, but your nine-piece puzzle experiences are consistently getting 60% completion rates or higher, you know nine is probably the sweet spot.
Making sure your branding complements the overall design
Whether it’s a photo puzzle you create, or you get a purposely made illustration, the puzzle visual may be the most important aspect of your custom experience, but it’s really only half the picture.
On the branding creation step of the puzzle template on Drimify, you can set the background, define how your logo appears, and customise the appearance of the buttons and the font, as well as other global aspects that recur throughout the jigsaw puzzle experience.
What’s important here is to consider how that background is going to look against your puzzle image (or puzzle images). A bad clash, or a lack of differentiation could negatively impact your user experience.
Factoring your objectives into your design
You also have to remember, this custom-branded jigsaw puzzle you’re making is a gamification experience – this isn’t sitting down by the fire to put together a 1,000-puzzle piece behemoth together with the family for fun, you’re not in the jigsaw business – you’re engaging users to achieve specified purposes, and the Drimify jigsaw puzzle game engine has many different options to help you in this.
For example:
- Collect data: You can include a data collection form either before or after the puzzle experience, where you can ask for different demographic data and preferences.
- Convey brand messaging: You can include intermediate content screens before or after the puzzle where you can have images or video, along with text. This is ideal for product promotion, education, and raising awareness.
- Encourage participants to take desired actions: On your end screen you can include a call to action button (CTA), where you can hyperlink to a strategic website page. This could be a product page on your eCommerce site, or an informational page where they could learn more about a subject.
Of course, your jigsaw puzzle picture must also tie into this in some way. If you’re promoting your corporate social responsibility initiatives, you could use a photo of one of your projects in action, or if you’re promoting a product, have visuals created of your product being used.
If the puzzle visuals bear no relation to the overall message and aim, you’re creating a disconnect between your audience and your goal (which is the opposite of gamification).
Testing and optimising the online jigsaw puzzle’s UX
The final thing to do before you launch your custom jigsaw puzzle is to test it. As soon as you think your puzzle is ready, start testing it relentlessly in-house to check that it’s up to your brand’s standards and fit for purpose – or to put another way, as closely tuned to your audience’s expectations as you can with the data you have available.
This is where old-school marketing comes into practice.
Think up personas for your target audience, be they employees in team X, or customers that are part of segment Y – then play through the games with them in mind. You’re looking for:
- Scroll depth on expected device types (typically the shorter the scroll depth the better)
- Unnecessary screens that break up the UX, and might bore participants and have them tap out of the experience and fail to complete it
- Anything that doesn’t fit or undermines the purpose
Ultimately, testing is bound to throw up a few elements of your jigsaw puzzle game that need improving.
Gamified online jigsaw puzzle creation is really no different to shooting or writing an ad. It’s not going to happen in a first draft or in one take.
You’re not waiting for inspiration, you’re putting ideas into the jigsaw puzzle template and experimenting and testing until you have an optimised user journey ready to launch.
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