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Building VK New Year App: Turning a seasonal event into a viral game

PRODUCT DESIGN
2021
MOBILE
PROTOTYPING

Building VK New Year App: Turning a seasonal event into a viral game

MINI APPS
2021

Context. VK is a major social network among Russian-speaking users with 92M monthly users (2024).

Problem. VK needed to earn more money without showing users even more ads.

Problem. Existing VK holiday campaigns lacked engagement.

Monetisation was mostly built on advertising. Ads annoyed users, reduced engagement, and didn’t help build long-term loyalty.

Problem. Existing VK holiday campaigns lacked engagement.

Goal. Create a festive game that replaces ad-heavy monetisation with engagement-driven revenue through gifts ✦

VK launched a $200,000 holiday giveaway to triple revenue through high-impact ad integrations.

VK wanted to run a $200,000 holiday giveaway and triple their revenue through festive ad integrations ✦

Concept. Together with the Product Managers, we came up with an idea where the memes of 2020 travel by train to gifts in 2021.

Train with top 2020 memes

The user needed to assemble this ticket, which was split into nine fragments ↓

Collect all 9 fragments to board the train

How do you collect the ticket? By spinning the prize roulette from VK’s partners.

Fragments dropped together with the rewards ↓

User receives a gift and a ticket fragment

Retention. To keep retention high, we created a daily rewards system.

Process. One app with a large ecosystem of states and flows behind it.

Trading economy. Our team introduced a mechanic for sending and trading fragments ✦

Trading economy. Together with the Product Manager, we introduced a mechanic for sending and trading fragments ✦

Users started exchanging and selling fragments, and we saw a spike in communities dedicated to reselling.

Users started exchanging and selling fragments, and we saw a spike in communities dedicated to reselling.

This boosted the app’s growth ↓

Users gifted fragments to each other

30+ partners joined the event, attracting millions of users through tasks and prizes.

Trading economy. Together with the Product Manager, we introduced a mechanic for sending and trading fragments ✦

Partners integrations

Impact. I designed the full UX and visual system for the New Year App, enabling:

~$1M in brand integrations
and seasonal promotions

30M users participated
in the New Year event

Over 180 million minutes
spent in the game (collectively)

High return rates driven
by gifts, missions and progression

A reusable system
for future seasonal events

Daily return rate reached
27% during peak days

The New Year App became one of VK’s most successful seasonal products and set a new standard for how the platform runs festive events ✦

Featured in the news ↓

More about in news ↓

Article about the application (sostav.ru)
Marketing video
Team
Designer: Kirill Sidorets
Managers: Andrew Oshanin, Ivan Katamov
Developers: Leo Shevchuk,
Damir Bogdanov
My Role
Senior Product Designer
Used tools
Figma
Updated in December 2025 by
Kir
Updated in December 2025 by
Kir
Updated in December 2025 by
Kir