About
ScoreBoard is an application designed to enhance gamers reviewing experience. By allowing users to tag their reviews under specific categories such as music, visuals, sound and more, it offers a personalized way to find games that align with the user’s interests. The onboarding experience was the main focus of this project.
Problem statement
How might we create a video game review application that focuses exclusively on video games and helps gamers online receive insightful, truthful, scannable, and interesting reviews that are worth consulting before and after making game purchases?
Goal
Give out a user friendly and fun application that focuses exclusively on video games reviewing, a platform to share and discover new games based on user's preferences. The aim is to simplify game discovery and help gamers find the perfect games that resonate with their interests all while ditching the traditional reviewing system and introducing a new approach to by integrating tags, media and gamification.
My role:
User experience
User interface
User research
Deliverables:
Prototype
Research
Design
Duration
Research
We conducted a competitive analysis on 4 different competitors; Backloggd, We The Players, IGN, and Meta Critic. Their unique value proposition, advantages and disadvantages were analyzed. The data collected was used to better understand what is lacking in the gaming reviewing industry, what has been done, what it the norm and try to create an application that works the best for gamers.
The research was focused on competitors and user interviews.
Competitor analysis
To learn a little bit more about the market, we observed and analyzed several competitors and noted some of the features they were offering their users. When it comes to gaming reviewing applications, the playground is not saturated and there is space for more innovation. We analyzed Backloggd, We The Players, IGN and Meta Critic, some of the only competitions in this niche.
The key findings
- Only one available application for games reviewing; not exclusive for games.
- Lack of categorized reviews.
- Onboarding experience missing in 3 of 4 competitors.
- Backloggd, the most popular platform, uses gamification by endorsing users with badges.
User interviews
The data collected during our 3 user interviews were crucial to understand the needs and preferences of gamers. We learned that users give great importance to reviews, as it helps them select future games they would like to play. Gamers also enjoy interacting with other gamers, which was an important information as it helped us better shape our application.
The key findings
- Users will find reviews helpful in determining if a game is worth playing.
- Users can be overwhelmed by the amount of reviews that can be online.
- Skims through review videos to watch the important parts only.
- Most will check out reviews before buying a game.
Users and audience
We first started with a large target audience; gamers of all ages and different background. We quickly decided to focus on a smaller audience pool to better understand the gamers need, so we conducted 3 different users interviews. We created a persona with the collected data. This persona was referred to as a general idea of our target audience throughout the entire product designing process in order to remain focused when making design decisions.
Empathy map
After more research on the users, we finalized he empathy map. We separated what our persona says, thinks, does and feels, to give us a general idea of the features we wanted to implement into the design and what we should focus on first.
Wireframes
As we all know, wireframes are always far away from the final results.
We started with a few basic sketches of how we wanted the overall layout to be structured to begin the design stage. We focused on the onboarding experience, which was an important requirement for this project. Reflected in the sketches shown above, the first few screens where the users sign up and start selecting games they want to review.
User testing
After conducting user testing with 3 participants before finalizing our designs with high-fidelity mockups, we gathered various insights from users, which helped us improve our user interface.
The following changes were made and displayed below:
Final design
The purpose of this application was to allow regular gamers to leave their opinion about a game as well as discovering easily new games based off their preferences, helping them make a more informed choice before buying or playing a new game. The application introduces a new way of leaving reviews, by tagging the appropriate categories reviewed to make it easier to read and find sections that are of interest to the user. With this in mind, we wanted the app to have a gaming community feel.
Learning & takeaways
This project took 6 weeks to ideate, design, test, and implement. With such limited time, our main focus was the onboarding experience. I learned more about gamers behaviours and preferences as well as the industry of gaming in general. There were more than 30 screens and designs, innumerable iterations, hours of research, user interviews, testing and more. This project was a huge learning experience for my team and I.
Thanks for reading!
