Pocket Camp Is a UX Nightmare
By: Mariana Vargas
Tags: Animal Crossing, Design, Games, Visual Design, UX

Pocket Camp Is a UX Nightmare

My UX mindset doesn’t miss a chance to criticize and learn from my favorite apps.

Fig.1 — Animal Crossing official logo. Image from Nintendo

When I downloaded Animal Crossing Pocket Camp this Summer, I got almost immediately addicted. Since then, I’ve spent hours fishing, growing flowers, and crafting furniture. It’s a lot of fun. However, I can’t help but feel frustrated with some recurrent issues.

As a UX Designer, I try to keep in mind every mistake is a learning opportunity. I am not responsible for Pocket Camp design, but understanding its faults is valuable knowledge for me, as a UX professional. Therefore, I decided to list some insights about my personal experience with this game and what I learned from it.

The pressure to make micro-transactions

Fig.5 — Leaf tickets icon. Image from Pocket Camp Wiki.

Pocket Camp works with two different currencies:

Bells : in-game currency that can be earned when accomplishing most of game’s goals. These can be used to upgrade the player’s camper, purchase items, etc.

: in-game currency that can be earned when accomplishing most of game’s goals. These can be used to upgrade the player’s camper, purchase items, etc. Leaf Tickets: the premium currency that can be purchased with real money or obtained through regular gameplay. These can be used to speed up every facet of the game and acquire special items.

Long-time gamers have been complaining about the pressure to buy leaf tickets because when the app was launched, the number of paid items was much smaller, which led users to create the expectation they didn’t need to invest to have everything.

As a recent user, I don’t share this feeling. However, I do feel annoyed by useless features that merely exist to encourage spending leaf tickets (I will get to this in detail in next sections).

Lesson learned: Design should attempt to increase positive emotions such as happiness and pleasure, and decrease negative effects, such as anger and frustration. It’s the designer’s responsibility to take users feel into consideration and acknowledge long time players who, in this case, feel betrayed by the micro-transaction incentives.

Limitation of 10 help requests to access shovelstrike quarry at once

The quarry is a place where players can break rocks to find rare minerals and gems, which are then converted into prizes.

To access the quarry, users must choose one of the following options:

Request and receive help from at least 5 friends (available once a day);

Spend 20 Leaf Tickets;

Every day I try to get help from 5 friends to enter the quarry. My frustration with this process is a system limitation that only allows up to 10 help requests at once. Since I have more than 60 friends, I have to repeat the sending request process more than 6 times to reach all my contacts.

Fig.2 — Screenshot of the error message displayed when trying to ask for help of more than 10 friends at once

Lesson learned: Avoid redundant tasks that make users waste time repeating efforts.

Lloid’s help is useless

A Gardening Event is a bug-catching event in which players plant seeds and capture insects.

Players can capture insects themselves, or ask Lloid to help by spending some leaf tickets. The advantage of relying on him is because he never misses, so the catch is certain.

Fig.3 — Lloid’s help illustration. Image from Perfectly Nintendo

The thing is I never felt the need to turn to Lloid to capture bugs. When I do it myself, some bugs inevitably escape, but I know eventually I will get all the ones I need to reach the event’s goals. Leaf tickets are hard to get, so I tend to be very careful on how to spend them. I asked myself:

Why would anyone recur to Lloid’s help?

I decided to ask other Pocket Camp gamers to find my answers.

Fig.4 — Reddit Poll results about Lloid’s help utility

According to Fig.4, less than 4% of users have used Lloid’s help and the main reason for using its help was:

It was a mistake.

The results indicate this feature is useless and only exists to make users spend leaf tickets by accident.

Lesson learned: A good UX Design will be able to convert visitors into customers by their own will and do not make them feel pressured either betrayed during that process.

Note: In my research, one gamer mentioned Lottie’s advice feature, in Happy Homeroom, which is similar to Lloid’s help in its uselessness. Later, I also thought about the golden rod. I don’t have statistics to defend my hypothesis, but I believe all these features are unnecessary. Curiously they have something in common: they can only be bought through Leaf Tickets.

The mailbox inconsistency

Fig.6 — Screenshot of my mailbox contents

Items received as gifts are received in the mailbox. The user needs to check out his mailbox regularly to collect these items and manually add them to his storage.

What I can’t understand is Pocket Camp’s definition of “received item”. Both items received from other players, namely friend power, and Sholvelstrike Quarry rewards are sent to the mailbox. On the other hand, gifts from villagers and Gulliver’s Ship rewards are added directly to the storage.

This inconsistency in the mailbox feature makes me confused. Sometimes I earn something and want to use it right away but I can’t find it my storage. I end up finding that item in my mailbox. Therefore, the mailbox is an extra step in the game flow with inconsistent functionality, which makes the user frustrated when his expectations aren’t met.

Lesson learned: Take user’s mental models into consideration to develop designs that will make sense to them.

Poor dialogs for furniture requests

Sometimes, villagers ask what furniture to give to another villager as a request, giving the player three options to choose from. The challenge of this request is to determine which of the options the villager would like to receive.

Fig.7 — Screenshot of Freya asking for help to choose a gift for Naomi

In Fig.7 we can read Freya’s dialog asking for help to choose a gift for Naomi and the three options I can choose from — regal sofa, rococo chair, or hearth. In this case, I have all the data I need to choose the best furniture piece for Naomi: I just have to take Naomi’s personality and preferences into consideration. This is a good example of a request dialog.

Fig.8 — Screenshot of Bianca asking for help to choose a gift

In Fig.8, we can read the dialog Bianca used for a similar purpose. This time, however, she mentioned the name of the villager she intends to please earlier and the final dialog does not include it. In consequence, when she presents me with the options, I already forgot the villager she mentioned and have no clue how to make my choice.

In spite of knowing this is not the user’s fault, I can’t help but feel frustrated for not being able to memorize the information I needed to complete the task accordingly.

Lesson learned: Relevant information to the current activity must be always available.

Final remarks

UX Design is an interactive process. There is always room for improvement in any application or service.

I identified key pain points I regularly come across when I play Pocket Camp to learn from them and incorporate that knowledge into my projects.

Despite having some faults, Animal Crossing is a very fun game and I will continue to play it. If you also play Pocket Camp, please add me! My ID is 4780 6371 211 — I promise to water your plants!

Fig.9 — A screenshot of my proud avatar