I decided to take a mobile-first approach to this project and sketched out each of the red routes. These initial sketches focus on key screens for their respective flows and the first iteration of low fidelity wireframes for the user interface design. (see the first four sketches on the next page!)

I wanted to validate that the product was on the right track, so I did a quick and simple guerilla usability test with 5 participants. I created the prototype for this test using Pop Marvel, a mobile prototyping app. The test yielded a couple of key learnings: overall navigation needs improvement, profile creation should be expanded, and the call to action button labels are too vague.

A competitive analysis gave me an idea of the industry standard as far as potential aesthetics and interface layouts that gamers would gravitate towards. While the user interfaces were well designed and clean, the subject matter circulating among users was not— and directly conflicted with the problem space for this project. In using these apps for my research and analysis, I stumbled upon a plethora of explicit posts and questionable content relating mostly to nudity, hate speech, and poor sportsmanship.

I’m confident the designers of these apps had not intended for their products to be used this way, but this became something to consider heavily moving forward. I decided the brand platform, image and overall execution of the project needed to leave no room for this sort of material so as to lessen the likelihood of toxic behavior and generally questionable content to be circulated.

I cycled through several potential names for this product, all channeling attributes like friendliness, safety, thoughtfulness, sincerity, eagerness, and plain old fun. Aesthetically inspired by retro-arcade rooms and social gaming led to the eventual stumble into the term ‘safe space’. A safe space, as defined by Oxford Languages, is ‘a place or environment in which a person or category of people can feel confident that they will not be exposed to discrimination, criticism, harassment, or any other emotional or physical harm.” Thus, Game Room: a safe room for gamers to socialize— was born! Take a peek at the mood board below:

Take a look at the high fidelity mock-ups I made building off of my wireframes and style guide!

This test was developed with the intention of finding usability problems relating to the potentially overwhelming nature of the reporting form, checking the match-making functionality and re-calibration, and also to gather general impressions of the organizational aesthetic of Game Room’s design. Aside from these, I sought to evaluate the accessibility of the iconography in the bottom tab bar— are the icons big enough and do they lead where the user expects them to? Additionally, I wanted feedback on the reporting form’s structure and layout.

1. All users expressed concerns about whether their matches would be calibrated correctly to them and not just for their current mood, but for when they have a change of mood as well. 

2. Currently, the only form of accountability in Game Room—reporting a player— is too severe. This level of severity and information gathering made participants feel conflicted if they should report the other player in testing or just ignore the issue altogether.

3. All participants stumbled when they came across the “Recent Matches” tab bar. It is currently unclear where to go to see recent matches and messages. Part of this is because there is no empty state screen for the Recent Matches page, which threw people off in this first round of testing.

I performed this round of usability testing in the same way as the first round. In this round, however, the first round’s recommendations were applied in the re-iterated design and prototype.

1. All test participants expressed approval of the ability to choose a temporary playstyle per match.

2. When participants were given the task to change their playstyle so as to not meet a specific type of player again, a few expressed concerns about not changing their playstyle and instead preferring to block or rate the previously matched user. 

3. Two participants were concerned about how to filter out people who act differently than their profile or matchmaking preferences.

4. Participants responded well to having the option for less severe accountability.

5. Participants loved having the overview at the end of the reporting process.

6. No usability issues on how to navigate to matches, messages, and other user profiles. 

7. One participant was a bit confused at first that matches were games they’ve played or queued up for rather than people.

1. As a future update, consider adding a rating function per match to further calibrate each user's individual experience.

2. A few voiced concerns in the reporting flow, if there would be enough characters to describe an incident. Consider increasing the character count.

3. One user expressed wishing for history or tracking of reports so that they know that they are heard and can see the effects of their report. Consider assigning a tracking number and ‘reports submitted’ section.

4. UX writing consideration: The word ‘match’ can mean the actual game played or the person they have been paired with. It wasn’t enough to break the usability test, as only 3 people out of 15 participants struggled with this aspect. Consider adding more context throughout onboarding and the rest of Game Room to define what a match is for Game Room’s purposes. Alternatively, consider including a question mark or other icon for users to read more information about a specific page or action.

See below the prototype for Game Room!