Improving MoneroDice
MoneroDice is a dice and blackjack game site that accepts Monero. It’s simple and private; there are no accounts or KYC procedures.
Since May of this year, I’ve been helping improve the site’s player experience.
Bugs
I started by testing the site and looking for bugs. I did find a couple, but nothing critical or worth bringing up in this post.
Language
Much of my work centered around making the site’s wording as clear as mightly.
I transformed titles into sentence case and rewrote phrases to simplify punctuation. I removed phrases like PLAY NOW—previously used in page titles—since they gave off a cheap and scammy vibe. I made a range of corrections to the FAQ.
“Select your odds & win multiplier” became “Choose your win multiplier & odds”. The word chance was ubiquitously replaced with odds.
Verbs are the mightiest words. Thus the Feedback page’s full title “Feedback request” became “Leave feedback”.
Multiplier symbols * and x were all transformed into the traditional (and beautiful) ×.
I also helped write promotional texts for Reddit & Cryptwerk, and made a banner for the latter:
Ease of use and player experience
But it’s not all about words. The user interface’s functionality matters too.
Since 🚀 and 🗽 emojis were used to show the game mode in the Recent games table, I added them to the mode selection itself:
I flipped the order of Feedback comments to show the latest ones up-top; feedback is not a blogpost discussion.
A good user interface forbids pointless actions. Thus, I froze a bunch of buttons in various circumstances:
- the nav-menu button for the current page,
- “Copy address” and “Open in wallet” buttons when a payback address is not provided,
- Blackjack’s “Show related transactions” button when there are no transactions to show,
- Blackjack’s + button when a player does not have enough bankroll to raise the bet,
- the button for the current background.
I also made sure the email address in the footer became clickable.
The other smol (but helpful) improvements, both to interface and typography, are too many to list here.
Blackjack
To lessen cognitive burden, I stopped listing buttons’ functions on their hint pop-ups. In this case, the words “Double down” no longer appear:
When disabling the computer’s voice, it no longer reacts by saying “voice disabled”.
MCEP suggestion
I also suggested MoneroDice sign the Monero Circular Economy Pledge—it was already matching the criteria. MoneroDice is now one of the Pledge’s signatories.
Result
More people than ever are playing MoneroDice, and they are sharing their delight on Reddit, Cryptwerk, and on the site’s own Feedback page.
Here’s the client’s review:
I’m actually quite happy from the work you have done for MoneroDice so far. I’ve made many improvements with your suggestions and advice.
Communication is kept professional.
I like that you are proactive looking for things which could be improved.