the wonder ecosystem
research & feature development for mobile & Tv interfaces • Wonder
A BOLD FEAT, JUST LIKE OUR AUDIENCE
Wonder introduced the first Android-based platform built for seamless, all-in-one play. Using Wonder’s custom smart-phone hardware, users can create an integrated experience between all gaming fronts; mobile, console, and retro gaming.
MY ROLE
As the UX designer, my area of focus was to help design a custom mobile operating system (Android) with an integrated TV interface. Using a customized approach, gaming is brought to life through Wonder's unique lock screen, app drawer, controls, native applications, and more.
Challenges
Being a start-up, and starting out as the sole designer on the team, resources were limited. With no existing user research, I was on a mission to immerse myself in the gaming world to identify the target user behaviors and needs.
research
Pictured: Persona Building Research
Step 1: Surveys
Goals:
To validate our potential audience, and to understand their gaming and smart-phone related behaviors & interests.
Results:
Surveys were distributed to 100 people, with some insights that would help shape in-depth interview questions, and persona build.
Step 2: Interviews
Pictured: Card Sorting Task
Goals:
7 gamers who fit our niche were brought in for depth interviews, to find out what features they were interested in.
Interviewee Card-Sorting Task:
After in-depth interviews, users were asked to prioritize thosefeatures.
The results led us to feature optimization and helped us to prioritize certain features over others.
Persona & User Stories
Step 1: Persona Building Based on Results
5 Personas were developed to represent our users:
1. The Young Professional: Gaming is a part of my life, but it's not my top priority.
2. The Intensive Gamer: Gaming is life.
3. The Influencer: Gaming is important to me, but talking about it is even more important.
4. The Entrepreneur (Techie/Gadget Collector): I want to have every gadget out there because I want to be up-to-date with all the trends.
5. The Student: I'm a social gamer, extremely tech-savvy, and constantly playing video & mobile games.
Step 2: User Stories To Help Feature Build
A list of users stories based on our personas was created to develop feature specifics.
feature building
Our goal was to create an interconnected, cohesive system that would encompass all the features below:
Each feature has it's own set of research, wireframes, and prototyping stages, and are a piece to Wonder’s holistic system.
1. community
A Wonder-exclusive gaming social network where user can connect to people online who play the same games, participate in group discussions about their favorite games, and get game news from official sources.
2. WONDER BAR
A user can enter Wonder’s game mode, making mobile gaming more efficient through different controls like performance enhancement, streaming or recording gameplay, and connecting to the Wonder gaming community.
3. CUSTOMIZED App LAYOUT
A customized app drawer, which categorizes classic games, gamepad games, and ROM's (retro games that are provided through emulators).
4. Classic game-PLAY
Providing a more efficient way to download retro games to play on your mobile device.
5. TV LAUNCHER
The ability to play mobile games and launch apps on the big screen using Wonder's TV Launcher & controller.
*Screens available upon request.