Advanced UX Prototyping
Process and Pipeline development for advanced prototyping
CHALLENGES
1) Limited Dev. Bandwidth: With a mid-sized developer team focussed heavily on feature production, it was difficult to get a engineering resource to prototype UX flows and ideas especially for features involving complex player interactions.
2) User Testing Handicap : This created a bottleneck both in terms of range of solutions UX team wanted to explore to tackle a specific problem and user testing it to generate valuable data during pre-production, before we lock a spec. down for production.
3) Pre-Production Timelines : Pre-production schedules are generally quiet aggressive and involve heavy iterations. Finding and defining the right time in your process is crucial to know when a hi-fi prototype needs to be built to avoid hampering the ideation process.
MY ROLE : AS UX Director
Design Sprint Planning: to come up with a process and set of tools to help UX team achieve this goal, without Dev. support.
Resource Allocation: Allocate UX and UI designers to research available tools in the market , prepare a benchmark comparison report.
Resource Allocation: Allocate UX and UI designers to research available tools in the market , prepare a benchmark comparison report.
Defining Process Pipeline: Set up a process pipeline, involving multiple stakeholders and design disciplines to create a waterfall model.
Evaluation: Benchmarking reports from my team, finalise a process plan
Proof of Concept: I created a pilot prototype, using the new pipeline and tools as proof of concept
Stakeholder Buy In: Present the proof of concept to stakeholders for their by in.
The Model: High Stake Rapid Prototyping with Cross Discipline Teamwork
By high stake, I implied involving top tier stakeholder group, who make decisions on developing a product strategy, signs off on feature specs. during pre-production or before development starts.
- Product (PM, CEO)
- BA/Game Design (Directors, Leads)
- UX (Directors, UX Resources)
- UI (Leads, UI Resources)
- Art (Art Director, Leads)
- Dev (CTO, Dev leads)
- Product (PM, CEO)
- BA/Game Design (Directors, Leads)
- UX (Directors, UX Resources)
- UI (Leads, UI Resources)
- Art (Art Director, Leads)
- Dev (CTO, Dev leads)
The Dichotomy of Pre-Production process
It is common knowledge, during rapid iteration cycles of spec. creation and documentation with stakeholder group, users are often left out if features to be built are complex and need dev. support, often user testing happens quiet late and it is difficult to make big overhauls.
Injecting rapid prototyping, between the phases of Spec. Creation and Spec. visualisation is the only way to breach the wall early into pre-production and get the user buy ins.
Testing ,trying and finalising the tool.
By trying out different tools over a period of 2-3 weeks in our design sprints and encouraging UX team to try out tolls to capture complex interactions, and doing desk research about latest prototyping softwares, we narrowed down our tools. Principle, seemed to tick many boxes for us.
Defining Process Pipeline
In a typical design sprint, by aligning and overlapping conceptualisation stages of UI and Art with ending of low fidelity prototyping stage from UX, a window of opportunity is created where a Hi-Fid prototype can be built using first pass art and UI
Pilot Testing: Match 3 Game without writing a single line of code
Main flows and heuristics attempted to nail down with this prototype were:
Initial loading - Keeping the player informed
On-boarding/tutorial - Teach the player how to use your product
Game map - Show player the path to progression
Level design + Core loop
Booster mechanics : Unlocking a booster
Booster mechanics : Teaching players how to deploy a booster
Completing the gameplay CORE loop
Reward screen - Rewarding players for tasks they have completed
Progression on map - Creating a sense of progression, how far the player has come
Low-Fi wireframes to map out the flow of the feature.
Converting low-fid wireframes in to hi-fid UI screens.
PROTOTYPE Walkthrough - VIDEO DIARY
The timeline of putting together a prototype of this fidelity whilst working with other disciplines is generally around 5-7 days. Approximate development time even with hacked code might easily be easily 3-4 weeks.
Play Test Setup
We placed this prototype in a players hand and conducted a usability testing session, as we would in a real project setting, to:
Quantify the user experience and gauge the robustness of this prototype in real world play testing.
For play testing, as a rule, I work with external UX researchers and moderators to eliminate any bias and just be an unbiased observer. But now, I will dawn on my research hat to moderate this session.
Test Subject Persona:
I wrote up an play testing brief for testing user stories and objective of the test.
Conducting the Playtest - VIDEO DIARY
Compiling & interpreting the results : Quantifying the experience
Evaluation : Successful
Testing the prototype with both real users and stakeholder, we were able to establish prototype did work and feel like an actual on-device build offering same level of fidelity, interactions and feel for the user imitating reasonable scenarions that user would come across if testing an actual on-device development build.
This gave us the ability to develop low fidelity and high-fidelity rapid prototyping skills and best practices within the UX team, without Dev. support involving complex features and interactions. It contributed heavily in developing and validating user interactions of many features across products.
