GAMEGENIE
Designed by Cady Hamby, Erica Hester, and Roxie Cole
ABOUT
GameGenie is an app for connecting gamers to games that matches their interests and other games that they have played. We have molded this idea into something we are all very proud of and I would love to show you our process and the steps we took through our sprints to get to where we are now. We used Lean UX methodology in this class so everything was separated into sprints so I will be explaining everything based on what sprint it happened in.
SPRINT ONE
Week Zero
So, to start off GameGenies life cycle, we began week zero, also known as the design week. We established our proto personas, Jared and Madelyn who you can see below, created a product backlog, and separated that backlog out into our sprint backlog. Creating the product backlog, the list of what components we needed to add to the app, was definitely really helpful for us all getting on the same page and understanding where each of us wanted this project to go. After that was established, we split up our work for Sprint 1 by taking the biggest, most important parts of the app as our tasks for this time. We did this because we felt that that would be better for us in the long run, in terms of having to make changes based off of interviews. This meant that sprint one was definitely much busier for us than sprint two but also gave us more time to make everything perfect down the road.
Proto-Personas
Below, you can see our primary persona and secondary persona, Madelyn and Jared respectively. We created these two based on the idea that we thought that the main users of GameGenie would be intermediate or expert gamers who already have the interest in video games and would like to learn about more. We made Madelyn the expert gamer and a Twitch streamer, a person who plays video games live online, and Jared the intermediate gamer who wants to learn more but has less time dedicated to video games. We agreed that this is who we assumed would want to use the app the most and later confirmed that in our interviews.
Week One
For week one, we hit the ground running. I think we were initially a little unsure about how to approach the wireframing portion of things but we ended up deciding to split everything up so we could save time. We had to make a game catalog, a game profile page, a page for filtering tags, and a page for the swipe screen. I worked on the filtered tags page, Roxie worked on the page for the swipe screen, and Erica did the game profile page and the catalog. Erica also on the side made an algorithm for how the process of matching someone to a game would actually work which helped a lot in the long run. This gave us a good starting point of how we wanted our app to look and how we needed it to be setup on the prototype in week two.
We also conducted two interviews that gave us the differing perspectives of how two different levels of gamers would want the app to work. They both gave us more ideas of what to add in prototyping like maybe adding a filter for consoles or adding a review feature.
Week Two
Week two was definitely very productive for us. Here we worked on the foundations of our app that have the most information like the swiping pages and the game profiles, which you can see the final versions of below. We worked on creating the layout for the profile pages together, which ended up actually deciding the style of our app, and then we each picked out a couple of games and did research for them on our own time so we would have at least nine different games for the time being. We also split up the other parts of what had sectioned out previously and made those all on our own time as well.
Along with all of that, we did two more interviews and were able to make some judgements about things we wanted the change in Sprint Two such as adding a tutorial for the matching page that tells you too swipe and adding an option to buy games when you are on a profile page.
SPRINT TWO
Week Zero
Week zero of Sprint Two was definitely really simple for us. The biggest part of week zero is revalidating what we came up with in week zero of Sprint One and we did not have many things we needed to fix. We went over our product backlog and decided that our ideas had not changed. We did add another proto persona, Josh, for those who were interested in the app but had little to no knowledge of video games and switched Jared, the intermediate gamer, to the primary persona. We decided this made the most sense from what we learned in our interviews in Sprint One. The biggest chunk of our time in week zero was spent creating our sprint backlog. Somehow, our product backlog disappeared so we had to redo it in order to create our backlog, but it was okay in the end. Once we had that all figured out, we listed everything we had left. We ended up having the onboarding process, the review feature, a featured games section, and a saved games section left to do.
Week One
Week one went by very smoothly. We created the wireframe for the onboarding process together which included the login page, a page to pick what platforms you play on, a page to pick the tags you want to find games under and an option to input games that you had already played. We made this an option because we had equal number interviewees say they either would ignore the feature or would love to have it. We thought the best way to keep both sides happy on that deal would be to make it optional. We also had to wireframe out the review page, which I did, the featured games page which Roxie did, and the saved games section that Erica did. Overall, the wireframing was very successful and set us up well to get good work done on the prototype.
Week Two
In week two, we wrapped everything up we had thought of up. We made the onboarding process, which you can see below, on the Figma board, added the review page to some example game profiles and added the featured games section to the catalog page. We also added a user profile section where the saved games, disliked games, already played games, and an update tags feature would live. This left us in a place where we had a lot of time to do some touching up on features, we had made in Sprint One like changing the game profile pages and the filters section a bit.
