Blackout Bingo: Design Blast !!! WIP PAGE

Role:

UI/UX Director

Year:

2020 - 2023

Responsibilities:

● Built and led a global, world-class remote team of designers. Mentored and managed the team, fostering growth and professional development


● Developed new processes to continuously improve the quality of the user experience, measured by user research that we organized and conducted


● Developed and led UX strategy to ensure the game aligned with player expectations in addition to collaborating with stakeholders and cross-functional teams to align on game vision and deliverables

Case Study: Home Screen Redesign

Blackout Bingo: Design Blast! went through a big game design pivot, switching it from a home design audience to a casino audience. These two player types expect a certain type of experience and the home screen especially needed to set a strong first impression. The game's design was a mashup between skill-based, multiplayer bingo and room decoration, including gacha mechanics. The core of the game was Bingo, which fits squarely in the casino audience realm. The game appealed to a largely female 25+ demographic who were motivated by casual competition, rewards and/or home design.


My role

UI/UX Director
Led vision and strategy
Designed and implemented
Managed a UI and VFX artist





Timeline

3 weeks








Who I worked with

3 UI/UX Designers
2 Engineers
1 Product Manager
1 Game Designer
1 Tech Artist
1 QA
1 Art Director
1 Producer
1 Game Lead

Strategy

The Problems
  • Game went through a design pivot from Casual to Casino focused, disconnected from genre expectations
  • Through user testing and surveys we noticed some were outspoken in their negative critique of the look & feel
  • Players weren’t interacting with chests
  • Didn’t gracefully handle larger aspect ratio devices
  • Not optimal tap zones for PLAY BINGO
    Wasn’t future-proofed for the PM’s requirements
Default image
Comp Analysis
  • Researched popular Casino games
  • Games that were portrait and contained gacha
  • Affinity mapping exercises to find common threads and things that stood out to us
Default image
Goals
  1. Fits gene expections
  2. Makes and impression and elicits positive responses
  3. Tablet experience doesn't feel worse than phone
  4. Improve gacha interaction

Execution

Ideation

Default image

Wireframes & Prototypes

Default image

Final Version

Default image

Motion Design

Default image
  1. Smart task management
    - Overlapped development and collaborated often

  2. Need to meet player expectations
    - If there’s a big game design pivot, your UI may need an overhaul as well especially if your audience changes

  3. Team matters
    - Identify and build on your team’s strengths, identifying gaps or weaknesses along the way but don’t focus too much on those
  1. Had a head-start with implementation in Unity
    - Significantly reduced time and risk without needing to lean on Engineering for hookup
    - Kept the existing hooks in place and used what was already there to create this new version
  2. Optimized with Tech Art
    - Especially with full screen images and animation
    - Made a number of optimization increases when doing this overall in terms of draw calls and atlasing

  3. Advise on QA’s test plan

    - Verify everything was hooked up and functioning as intended. Any issues were ticketed and resolved

Prototypes

Below are a sampling of some of the early prototypes I created on device or assisted with to test initial design concepts without taking engineering resources.