initial feature research

As the primary UX designer on Scrabble GO, I attend weekly Player Voice meetings with the UX Research team to help identify trends in player feedback and to help guide product decisions based on those trends. We send out surveys to our core player base on Facebook asking for their feedback and what they would like to see in our game. I also meet regularly with the performance team to see what their needs are and identify their pain points as well. The GDD for Adventures was created with these pain points in mind:

initial UX mockups

Before we sent mocks out to players, we wanted to figure out how our core gameplay was going to change based on the specifications written in the GDD. I made several iterations on both the board scene and the lobby scene and ended up on these as the final UX mockups for both the lobby and gameplay scene:

player research

After solidifying how the feature was going to work within the Scrabble framework, next was to ask players about gameplay mechanics and if they understood what each mechanic was just by looking at it without a tutorial. For this, I worked with both the product team and the user research team to create a survey that contained animated UI mocks to send to our Scrabble GO council (highly-engaged players who have signed NDAs when testing features). The survey structure for each gameplay mechanic consisted of one static mock with questions asking the player what they thought that mechanic did with the next page showing the animated mockup asking the same questions. Shown below is an example:

The results of these tests allowed the UI team to make changes to how gameplay mechanics looked before we shipped to a wider audience.

UX Flows

After high-level passes at the main screen layouts, I moved onto more detailed wireframe flow charts, such as the ones shown below:

These flows would also be diagrammed in editable charts in Confluence. I have more flow charts for this feature available upon request.

additional player research

When releasing Adventures to a wider audience, we initially rolled it out to a small segment (15%) of our player base on Android only. This was meant to serve as a technical test and as a way to gather player feedback to catch key changes before releasing to 100% of our audience. I worked with the user research team by requesting specific information to collect, such as:

• Overall satisfaction with the feature

• Likes & dislikes

• Difficulty perceptions

• Satisfaction with & understanding of new game mechanics

• Satisfaction with & understanding of rewards

Players would be taken to this survey via in-game interstitial (popup) and ran for 2 weeks.

initial feature research

As the primary UX designer on Scrabble GO, I attend weekly Player Voice meetings with the UX Research team to help identify trends in player feedback and to help guide product decisions based on those trends. We send out surveys to our core player base on Facebook asking for their feedback and what they would like to see in our game. I also meet regularly with the performance team to see what their needs are and identify their pain points as well. The GDD for Game Rooms was created with these pain points in mind:

initial UX mockups

For this feature I worked on creating high-level UX mocks while the product manager continued to flesh out details in the GDD. This led to a lot of iterations on how the main game room lobby was structured, but ultimately led to the best UX solutions. Some of the initial screen mockups looked like what is shown below:

Ultimately, after discussing with the product team, we decided that these mockups were too dense and weren’t geared enough towards our casual audience. I iterated with the product team and asked what parts of the feature were most important for them to show on-screen. Once I gathered that list together, I ended up making something less visually complex that focused more on user-generated content and less on hyper-detailed text blocks. These UX iterations are shown below:

One of the more challenging parts of this feature was to create a tournament bracket visual that could fit anywhere from 8 to 64 players and still be easy to use on a portrait device. I made several interactive prototypes to help visualize why a traditional sports bracket view wasn’t the best route to go and wasn’t really necessary for the goal tournaments was trying to achieve. I ended up creating a scalable bracket system that allowed designers to not only create 64-person brackets, but would also allow future scalability to 128 and beyond. Those mockups are shown below:

To further demonstrate the feasibility of this concept, I made an interactive prototype. You can access this prototype be clicking the image below or on this link.

UI mockups

After most of the initial UX flows were completed, I moved onto making UI. Process-wise, I started talking less often with the product design team and more with the Art and UI teams. Since multiple people were going to need to use these photoshop files, I created layer comps for each UI state and made sure all my groups and layers were labelled. All UI was also branded between Hasbro and Mattel, but I’m only showing the Hasbro brand colors in my mocks. Here is how some of the UX mocks translated into UI:

additional player research

Before we release to a wider audience, I’m working with the user research team to collect information about the following:

• Interpretation of the purpose of each screen

• Likes & dislikes

• Readability

• General feelings about each screen

Players will be shown a static UI mock of each major part of the feature and then shown an animated mockup on the next page. Showing each mockup type separately should help determine what impact animations have on player understanding of the feature.

initial feature research

As the primary UX designer on Scrabble GO, I attend weekly Player Voice meetings with the UX Research team to help identify trends in player feedback and to help guide product decisions based on those trends. We send out surveys to our core player base on Facebook asking for their feedback and what they would like to see in our game. I also meet regularly with the performance team to see what their needs are and identify their pain points as well. The GDD for Collections 2.0 was created with these pain points in mind:

initial UX mockups

Collections 2.0 was an enormous feature, so I started off working with the game designer and product team to construct the GDD while simultaneously creating UX mocks. Most of our initial conversations started with whiteboarding and boxing off what items we wanted to be the primary focus on each screen. These conversations also included talks about how the new Collections system was going to fit within the existing popup hierarchy within Scrabble GO. Some of the initial digital screen mockups looked like what is shown below:

Then the initial screen mockups needed to be pieced together in a simple main screen flow chart to present for approval and to further understanding of the feature among other product managers, such as the mockup shown below:

Through a series of iterations and powerpoint presentations (an example of which I can provide upon request), we ended up with a feature map that looked like what is shown below. This was made not to show every screen’s state map, but was mainly to illustrate the overall feature’s structure within Scrabble GO’s existing UX framework.

UX Prototype

Once I had completed my feature overview map shown above, I created an interactive prototype with all my UX mocks pieced together inside of it. This prototype was intended to do the following:

• Increase understanding amongst my peers of how each screen was going to connect together

• Uncover any loose ends I might have missed during the UX wireframing phase

• Send out for internal user testing within Scopely teams and gather feedback

• Send out for external user testing via PlaytestCloud following the completion of internal user tests

You can view this prototype by tapping the image below or clicking this link.