Dossier’sCase studies

Arclight is a game studio with an on-chain economy and two audiences who do not share a vocabulary.

Half their traffic came from gaming press and knew exactly what an on-chain item was. The other half arrived from a mainstream feature and needed the idea explained without being talked down to.

One page was trying to serve both, and doing neither well:

• Jargon in the first sentence, which lost the newcomers
• An explainer modal that everyone dismissed unread
• A wallet connection in the header, before anyone knew why they would want one
• A 14 MB trailer that autoplayed on phones

Explain the mechanic without a glossary and without condescension. Keep the page under a megabyte on a phone, trailer included. Move the wallet connection to the point where it makes sense.

We wrote the page twice — once for someone who knows the space and once for someone who does not — then built a third version that carries both.

Every term that needs one has a definition that expands in place. A modal explainer is a thing people dismiss; a word they can tap is a thing people read.

The shipped page:

• Plain-language copy with inline, expandable definitions
• The trailer muted and deferred, and never fetched on a saved-data connection
• Wallet connection moved to the section that explains what it does
• A static fallback for every animated element

Wallet connections rose 2.9x and bounce fell 47%, almost all of it on mobile.

The two audiences were never really two audiences. They wanted the same information at different depths, and a page that lets the reader pick the depth serves both better than two pages would.