Words With Friends 2

Because Words With Friends was a live service game, we had years of behavioral data. More importantly, we had direct access to players. Through surveys, interviews, longitudinal studies, app store reviews, prototypes, and live experiments, we set out to understand why people were leaving. Internally, we had assumed social churn was the biggest issue — that players left primarily when their friends stopped playing. Research told a different story. Players still loved Words With Friends. Their frustration was that the experience had become repetitive. That insight fundamentally changed our strategy. Rather than focusing exclusively on helping people play with friends, we started asking a different question: how might we create more reasons to engage with Words With Friends between turns?

Changing an iconic product requires more than good ideas. It requires organizational conviction. We adopted a highly iterative process that combined co-design sessions, rapid prototyping, user testing, in-game experiments, and soft launches. Every major idea had to survive multiple rounds of validation before moving forward. The goal wasn't to prove that change was good. The goal was to determine which changes players actually wanted. This process helped us move difficult conversations away from opinions and toward evidence.

The resulting strategy was simple: protect the core game while expanding the experience around it. One of the clearest examples was Solo Challenge. Research showed that many players wanted something meaningful to do when friends weren't available, and newer players wanted a safer place to learn and improve. Solo Challenge introduced increasingly difficult bots, themed events, and alternative ways to play that didn't depend on another person being online — a significant shift for a franchise built around social play, but one that directly addressed the biggest user pain points. Alongside new modes like Solo Challenge and Lightning Round, we modernized core experiences including the Games List, Game Board, and Create Game flows. Rather than reinventing familiar workflows, we focused on removing friction, improving discoverability, and creating systems that could continuously surface new content over time.

The visual redesign presented a challenge similar to the product strategy. Players wanted the game to feel modern, but they also had strong emotional connections to the existing brand. Through multiple rounds of testing, we learned which elements were essential and which could evolve. Some things changed dramatically. Others — such as the tile system and key brand cues — remained important anchors. The result was a design system that felt significantly more contemporary while remaining unmistakably Words With Friends.

Words With Friends 2 successfully re-energized the franchise. The launch generated significant media attention, became the first Zynga title to receive major television advertising support, and helped reestablish Words With Friends as a category leader.

My biggest takeaway from this project wasn't about game design. It was about leadership. Teams often assume that protecting a successful product means avoiding change. In reality, long-term success requires understanding which parts of the experience are sacred and which parts need to evolve. Words With Friends 2 succeeded because we didn't choose between preserving the product and changing it. We learned how to do both.