Guess the Gibberish

Overview

Inspired by the popular game concept from Mad Gab, "Guess the Gibberish" is an AR word game on Instagram that prompts the user to guess the real phrase from a bunch of words that make no sense at all, aka gibberish.

Due to unprecedented virality within the first few days, we had the opportunity to form a brand partnership with the company "What Do You Meme" and its subsidiary "Incohearent".

Try it out on Instagram here.

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The Idea

During quarantine, we watched a ton of video content on platforms like YouTube, Netflix, and TikTok. One of the videos we happened to watch involved a bunch of YouTubers (Jenn McAllister, Elle Mills, Luke Korns, etc.) playing a game called Incohearent. We enjoyed watching them guess the phrases so much that we even caught ourselves playing along. And so on a whim, we decided, "why not make it into an Instagram filter!"

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The User Experience

Once we had the idea for the game, it was time to move onto how it would look like and what the user experience would be. Fortunately, SparkAR (the tool used to create AR effects for Instagram and Facebook) provided a variety of user interactions for us to play around with.

Since the main focus of the game is the text itself, we wanted to make sure the interface was as simple and clean as possible. In addition, due to the nature of Instagram stories and reels, users are limited to small screen sizes and have limited time to take in information. This means that interactive filters, like this, need to be intuitive and frictionless.

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Concepts Applied

‍Color as Feedback

‍In our opinion, color is the fastest method to give visual feedback to users, we dare say even faster than icons or text. This is why streetlights are colors. And as huge fans of Kahoot, an online learning game platform, we loved how they used colors to distinguish between different states and answers. And so we carried their colors over as the backgrounds of our rectangles to indicate a change in state, making it intuitive for users to understand the progression of the game.

Minimalistic Visual Design‍

Every visual element in the filter (text, boxes, shapes) exists only to convey useful information to users. I made the design choice to minimize unnecessary elements so that users don't have to waste time figuring out what to do during the game. For example, the shape that houses the text is simply a rectangle with rounded corners and a small shadow to give it depth and dimension. And for the timer, its purpose is to tell users when their time of guessing is up. The numbers are housed in a simple circle, which appears only when it is needed and disappears once it has served its purpose.

Delightful Animation‍

Animation is an excellent way of adding delight to a filter. Additionally, it's a useful method to smoothly transition between different states of a filter. We implemented a simple rotation animation to indicate the start and end of the game as well as pulses for the timer for emphasis on the countdown.

Maximizing Replay Value

The best filters tend to be those that can be used over and over again. It's a lot more fun when users can keep replaying the filter with a different experience each time.

Having a high replay value also helps to boost the virality of the filter. More times played per user means more stories and videos posted and higher changes of their followers discovering and using the filter.

And honestly, we just went back to the basis. We made something that was fun to play and entertaining to watch.

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The Result

Insights

Video Compilations

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The Press

The filter was also featured in a few articles:

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What's Next?

We created @gibberish_official on Instagram to highlight our favorite videos as well as to have a designated place to host the main effect plus a few spinoffs, like NSFW and Microsoft!

Maybe merch and NFTs?? ;)