Context. VK is a major social network among Russian-speaking users with 92M monthly users (2024).
Goal. Create a festive game that replaces ad-heavy monetisation with engagement-driven revenue through gifts ✦
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
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.
This boosted the app’s growth ↓
Users gifted fragments to each other
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 ✦
