UX & Player
Advocacy
The Problem
Mighty Kingdom was missing a player-centric mindset due to its low UX maturity. Lacking player perspective and voice also increased project costs due to rework required on untested games.
TLDR
I established the UX team at Mighty Kingdom. We increased the UX maturity of the business and helped instil a player-centric mindset, allowing UX to become involved in design decisions at every step of the dev process.
Context
Mighty Kingdom, a company with almost 100 employees, had never had a UX designer before. However, despite my being the first UX employee in their history, the company was very open and I had the full support of the team to help raise the profile of UX.
Problem
We identified that the UX maturity of the business was extremely low. The lack of player representation and voice also increased project risk due to the potential for poor player reception to our games.
Research
I started by interviewing all of the discipline directors and execs about their understanding of UX and what it meant to them. I then audited the current play testing and other data gathering practices. I also posted internal polls on our Slack channels to gauge UX awareness. This combination of methods highlighted the fact that approximately 80% of the 70+ production staff had never engaged with a UX team or professional.
Solution
Firstly, I hired another UX designer and a UX researcher. This helped build the legitimacy of the department and gave us more options to expand our advocacy efforts. We then held in-person information sessions, lunchtime presentations on UX and its specific relevance to particular departments, as well as distributing internal documentation.
Collaboration was also a key factor in improving the UX mindset of the company. Through this we were able to become involved in conversations that would benefit from UX input. Player-centric design became more popular over the course of the next 6 months and within 12 months we were being invited to collaborate with teams (completely unprompted) on important design decisions.
Focusing on UX allowed Mighty Kingdom to avoid wasted work through testing concepts with players early, before games reached full production
Impact
Reduced risk, faster answers
Addition of usability testing and personas to guide design decisions and prototyping using Figma allowed for a reduction in risk before any code had been written. Finding answers to questions quicker by player testing or simple Figma prototype mockups helped designers iterate in a more informed way. Using wireframes for screen flows also helped engineers immensely and cut down back-and-forth between UI designers and programmers.
Increased collaboration
The increase in collaboration was necessary for designers and other team members to understand that it was that UX actually did. This lead to conversations and observations from both sides that allowed for better products and helped embed UX as a mindset within the product teams.
Increased UX maturity
UX is now widely known as a core part of all projects at Mighty Kingdom. UX as a mindset is more common and team members from all departments often ask for help with assumption validation. Leaning on UX to help with this type of decision-making now allows a more UX-driven workflow from the beginning of every project, and in-turn reduces project risk.
