Gaming Grimoire
Tools: Figma, FigJam, Microsoft Teams
Role: UX Researcher & Designer
Timeline: 9 weeks
Skills: Goal-Directed Design (GDD)
Gaming Grimoire is an all-in-one app for gamers to track their video game library and statistics, as well as keep up-to-date on game news, help guides, and sales. The app began as the brainchild of Cole Andrews, who led our team of four over the course of 9 weeks. I chose to work on Gaming Grimoire because I’m a gamer, but also because I admired Cole’s work in previous classes and knew he would make a great leader.
My role was primarily in user research, acting in a supporting role as a prototype designer. I also helped with team management by adding reminders to the team calendar, tasks to the kanban board, and assisting Cole with coordinating user interviews.
Gaming Grimoire was created as a study of Goal Directed Design (GDD), a user-centered design methodology created by Alan Cooper. This methodology involves designers in the research process so that they can better empathize with and understand the goals of the users whom they are designing for.
Over the course of eight weeks, we followed a modified version of GDD to design an app that would meet the goals of dedicated gamers:
Choose a phase above to learn more about our process.
During out kickoff meeting, we acted as stakeholders to decide who our app was for and what it would do.
Our target users were broad: people interested in gaming and statistics about their games.
We wanted our app to help users:
Next, we hit the books to research types of gamers, their motivations for playing (and buying) games and earning achievements, and the impact gaming has on people's wellbeing. I researched how game developers use trophies to motivate players to play and buy their games, and also how different players perceive meta-game reward systems.
Through our research, we learned that trophies appeal to completionists and achievement hunters, who display them as a point of pride. However, they're largely ignored (or even disliked) by casual gamers. This let us know that we needed to narrow our target users down to more dedicated gamers.
We also learned that being able to see playtime statistics helps avoid game addiction and that recommendation systems improve sales and buyer satisfaction.
In order to understand our product's domain, we researched our competitors' apps: PlayTracker, Steam, PlayStation, and Game Log.
Game Log and PlayTracker were most similar to our app in that they offered multi-platform tracking, however their UI could be clunky and detailed game stats were a paid feature. Steam and PlayStation had more polished and robust features, but lacked detailed game stats and confined users to their own platform. We also learned that all of these apps had social features to keep users connected and engaged.
So now it was time to pick the brains of some actual gamers to see what they actually wanted out of a gaming app. We completed five interviews, and I moderated two of them.
We quickly learned that we cast our net too wide. By not specifying the types of gamers we were looking for, we ended up interviewing more casual gamers who didn't care about gaming stats and achievement tracking. Whoops!
Two of our interviewees were the type of gamer we were designing for, though. They played a lot of games, put value into stat tracking and collecting achievements, and liked to see their friends' gaming activity.
After each interview, used affinity mapping to sort what we learned into categories relevant to our app. This let us easily see similarities and variations across different interviewees.
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Our next step was to sort our interviewees across different behavioral variables so that we could observe patterns and group individuals who shared similar behaviors.
After mapping them out, we saw two clusters form: Melenia (Purple) and Messmer (Blue) were more competitive gamers who cared about achievements and stats, while Morgot (Orange), Marika (Red), and Miquella (Green) played more casually and non-competitively.
From those two clusters came two personas: Melvin and Kennedy. Cole wrote the persona template for Melvin while I wrote the one for Kennedy.
Melvin was our primary persona, representing our target user: a dedicated multi-platform gamer with a large gaming library. He's competitive about achievements and likes to keep up with the latest game releases and news. He also loves knowing all about his gaming stats.
Melvin's goals centered around finding new games, tracking his achievements, and comparing his stats with his friends.
Kennedy became our secondary persona. She's in her thirties and has been playing video games for a long time. She owns a lot of games, but she's a more laid back and casual gamer. She doesn't care about achievements or stats, but she likes to look up help when she's stuck on games and also loves personalizing her player profile.
Kennedy's goals centered around finding a good deal on video games, returning to old games she hasn't played in a while, and having a fun and cozy time.
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Now that we had our personas, it was time to brainstorm. Cole divided it into three categories for us: what should the app be, what it can do, and what features to build.
Next, we considered both the data needs and functional needs of our personas and what they might expect from our app. We labeled each need with which persona it correlated to.
In order to understand how our product would fit into our personas' lives, we wrote context scenarios. This time, Cole and I switched personas: I wrote Melvin's context scenario and he wrote Kennedy's. Trading personas was a fun way for us to understand and empathize with both their perspectives.
Melvin is someone who's influenced by his friends' recommendations, but likes to research games before purchasing them. Still, he works in the gaming industry and can't resist the siren song of the hot new game everyone is talking about. He's still in college, though, so he appreciates being able to save a few dollars when he can. He's also competitive and achievement-hunting, but only looks for guides after he's tried to figure things out for himself. The guy also loves looking at his gaming stats and seeing the numbers go up.
With that in mind, I had a clear picture of how Melvin would navigate through our app on a normal weekday.
Now knowing what our personas wanted and how they would use it, we had to create a requirements list. Given the time limit and scope of our project, though, we had to cut a lot of features out.
The social features were the first ones to go. There were already other (and better) solutions gamers were using to connect and communicate with their friends, so we axed the friends chat and friends list. With the social features gone, profile customization no longer served a purpose and so we cut that out, too. And, finally, with no friends to compare stats with, the leaderboard also had to go.
In the end, we ended up with these features:
Next up? Putting it all together in a wireframe!
Before we began, I assisted with the information architecture to help the designers understand what pages we needed, how the pages were connected, and what content would be placed on them.
Max and Courtney's strengths were in design work. Along with Cole, they made extremely quick work of the lo-fi prototype. I worked on one of the game pages to get my feet wet and tried not to choke on their dust as our wireframe came to life around me.
Afterward, I helped map the key path scenario following our primary persona's context scenario.
Cole appointed Max as the lead designer. With some design directions from Cole, Max created a style guide for us to follow:
Following the style guide and the lo-fi version from our wireframe, I built the initial versions of the home page and game library using an 8pt grid to aid in alignment. Courtney created the statistics graph, which I copied over from his insights page design.
After we built the prototype, it was time to test it! We were fortunate and grateful to be able to bring back the two interviewees whose behavioral cluster formed our primary persona, Melvin. Our target users would be testing our app! Exciting!!
I prepared a list of preliminary questions and testing tasks for us, hoping to take aim at any weak points and uncertainties we had while building our prototype. It was a good starting point from which the other members could ask follow-up questions or include tasks of their own.
The usability tests were conducted virtually over teams as we didn't have the know-how to conduct them in-person using a phone. I moderated the second usability test and synthesized the notes after each session, further breaking their feedback down into a list of needed changes after our team discussed and agreed upon them.
The usability tests offered us a lot of valuable insight. While they liked the app and thought the design looked sleek, they found some of the icons and elements confusing.
We needed better navigation indicators, a better graph, and to rearrange the homepage. Instead of blasting the user with a large game advertisement, we wanted to present them with their gaming insights as soon as they opened the app. We added a more descriptive label above the trailer and moved it to the explore page, trading it for the At A Glance stats section that paired better with the stats graph on the home page. Add in a new version of the graph and... voila! The prototype was finalized.
GG's final version
(Graphic by Max Ray)
This was my first big prototyping project, as well as our first foray into Goal Directed Design. I had a lot of fun learning GDD and especially enjoyed the user research portions. User interviews and usability tests were a blast and I wish we could've done more.
Next project, I aim to be more detail-oriented. I didn't even realize until after the project had wrapped up but we completely forgot to add the achievements and game guide pages even though we included them in the wireframe. We divvied up the work but didn't check that all the pages had been assigned. As a result, we left out two major features of our app. Oops!
I also learned a valuable lesson about narrowing down the types of participants we recruit. We were struggling to find people to volunteer for our user interviews, though, and had a 'beggars can't be choosers' mindset but we should have been more proactive about recruiting the types of games we were looking for. I'd also like to prepare better questions sets to gather more relevant information.
Also? I need to keep practicing Figma.
In all, though, I'm proud of the work we did. This was a great group and a fun project to work on together. I'm already looking forward to the next one!
