RGU — Bringing Web 3.0 to India
By Udita Chaturvedi, UX Research Team at Hike
At the onset of 2022, I co-authored an article with my colleague Tanushree Sharma, on how UXR is evolving and assisting business and design decisions at Hike. That article spoke about how Rush has revolutionised the Indian play-to-earn gaming industry. Our AAA-quality real-money games introduced our users to a skill-based arena for making money online while entertaining themselves.
As the technology around us continues to evolve; Hike continues to innovate, keeping up with the pace but never losing sight of its users. This article is about how RGU makes the best use of new know-how to provide avenues to its users for ‘a better life’.
With countless and humongous milestones achieved in the first year of its operations, here’s an update on how 2022 has unfolded for us so far:
This year we levelled up from Play-Compete-Win to Play-Earn-Grow!
The First Steps… Building Global Credibility
2022 saw significant buy-ins, with more of the world’s leading businesses joining our vision. Backed by OG global leaders, we are on the path to becoming India’s first gaming DAO! With their backing, we have cracked the code to simplify the process of NFT minting.
The result? Within a span of mere 1.5 years since our inception, we’re on the blockchain! RGU air-dropped their very own NFTs in March 2022. The most loyal and engaged users got rewarded with the topmost tier called ‘The Boss’.
These NFTs come in the form of uber-stylish, close-to-life Rush Avatars that bring along earning superpowers with them. Millions of players in the Rush community have received different rarities and types of Rush Avatar NFTs as a reward for their loyalty.
However, that doesn’t mean we’ll leave the newcomers behind. In the true spirit of web3, everyone will get an opportunity to own a slice of this universe.
Read more about our future roadmap in our Rush Whitepaper.
Let’s talk about what ‘Ownership’ means to our users
The world is now at the cusp of Web 3.0 and our users continue to be opportunistic. They’re quick to change loyalties for something better. However, what remains constant is their need to look for new economic opportunities.
We empathise. In a country like India, where offline economy is not enough to support the growing needs of its population, we are bringing some daring innovations; wherein team UXR is solving the Web 3.0 puzzle by:
Putting the ‘U’ in users
By bringing in NFTs, we’ve led our users to own their first ever blockchain asset. Millions of youngsters from Tier 2 & 3 cities, though uninitiated to the web3 world, now already own a blockchain asset — an asset whose value they’re gradually understanding.
We’re talking about Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) but how do people from lower SECs really understand these complex terms? Here are a couple of real incidents from our foundational research to understand our users’ quality of awareness around NFTs and web3:
Our users’ initial misunderstanding of NFT was NEFT*!
Such an eye-opener, right? But there is a huge takeaway here. We realised, for them, it’s a long road to understanding NFTs. That being said, was it fair for us to make them do the hard work? It made us deep-dive to figure out if making users grasp the overall concept and not the literal meaning of NFTs would suffice.
And thus came our NFT- the ‘Naya Fantastic Token’! And it took Twitter by storm!
💡 The alternate approach worked!
It was what our users started talking about incessantly. Their curiosity was at an all-time high. It has now come to a point, where our users are impatiently waiting for us to open trading channels for them and enable their first-ever crypto transactions!
How are these monumental changes faring with the UXR team
6 months into our journey of taking Rush to the blockchain, work has been (positively) overwhelming. We are witness to a new strategy, a new way of doing things and a new mindset of getting things done, almost every single day!
It’s rare to see an Indian startup with UXR seeded so well into its functions. So why is Hike so invested in it?
The reason is simple. While Team Hike never scares away from taking bold, groundbreaking steps to bring evolution in our users’ lives; team UXR empowers those decisions by revealing how much ground is yet to be covered and gives direction to Hike’s innovation to ensure delightful, yet relevant user experiences.
Let’s discuss with another real UXR instance.
UX research helped us discover that most of our users hear about and interact with NFTs only on Rush. Hence, we consciously built a value proposition that NFTs equate to monetary gains. Our approach translates into correct user takeaways without having to explain the technicalities of NFTs.
Today, our users’ highest recall about their NFT are their superpowers which enable them to extract even more economic value.
They’ve developed an understanding that increased engagement with the app will help them grow economically in real life. Seeing the extra earning superpower associated with NFTs on Rush is becoming their main takeaway about NFTs in general.
What enables UXR at Hike to deliver this quality?
💡 Ownership!
It’s rare to witness leadership that instils such a deep sense of ownership in their employees that makes work full of purpose for us. The Hike Code serves as the foundation, topped off with Hike’s exemplary work culture that we spoke of in our previous article.
It’s fun! It no longer feels like you’re at work while you’re working. The process opens our minds to be more creative and effective in our approach to bring our user voice to the company from as many sources as we can gather.
In true DAO spirit, Rush has built democratic online communities with more than 60K subscribers! These communities are helping us build stronger foundations. While our users are getting an arena to interact with one another to express their interests and doubts, Rush is building governance — it’s a win-win!
We are also building knowledge pools, insight directories and so much more! And everything that we do sparks more enthusiastic ideas about what we can do next.
💡 Doing the Unthinkable in a Delightful, Hard-to-Copy and Margin-Enhancing-Ways
While we do understand that bringing crypto to the masses of India is a challenging job; it’s not impossible. Our drive to uncover every step of this journey will make all the difference!
Like our founder, Kavin Bharti Mittal says,
“If the world was to allow the apprehensions around the introduction of the internet back in the 90s, to affect its adaptability in our lives, we wouldn’t be where we are today!”
What do you think about Web 3.0 and its future in India? How does UX Research drive innovation in your organisation? If you are on a similar path and stirring the pots within the Web 3.0 world, would you like to discuss your experiences? Tweet to us @Rush Gaming Universe or join us in our communities on Telegram and Discord to get a conversation going.
*NEFT is a commonly used online money transfer method in India.
