PROJECTS

ABOUT ME

I'm a Senior Product Designer based in Logan, Utah. I am currently building a new video game database that helps players track and catalog their gaming legacies. Prior, I was working as a Senior Product Designer at Jane.com. My primary responsibility was to craft experiences for our Sellers and ensure they have the right tools to be successful on the Jane platform.I am adept at gathering data via user interviews and surveys to make sure I understand the user's pain points and deliver a product that not only solves their problems, but delights them. I am a highly collaborative designer who loves to work with stakeholders, product owners and developers to propose elegant solutions via wireframes, iterate through ideas, identify potential roadblocks and deliver vetted pixel-perfect designs.In another life, I was in a band. My only claim to fame is that we once opened for Neon Trees before they were well known in a small local venue. After our set, the lead singer told me we sucked. He was right. Hence the reason I'm a designer and not a rock star.

Game Tracking

User ResearchUser JourneyPersonasFlow ChartsWireframesBrandingUser InterfacePrototyping

Project Overview

PLAYDiT is a gaming database that allows gamers to track games they've played, find new games they want to play, and share with their friends what is good. PLAYDiT is a community that can document their gaming legacies, contribute their own perspectives on the games they've played, add unique posters and backgrounds and discover new games based on their “gaming DNA”.

My Contributions

When I joined PLAYDiT, the stakeholders were looking to me to provide insights into which of their many features they should focus on first. I was asked to identify he quickest path to profitability based on user research and competitive analysis. Based on the data, we determined that game tracking was the optimal feature to focus on, and that became the identity of the application. As the sole designer, it was my job to redesign existing pages, rebrand the product and marketing materials , and create new features to tie everything together.

So why game tracking? Identifying a market need.

Like many early products, PLAYDiT had multiple potential avenues it could travel. However, for PLAYDiT to be successful, it became very clear early on that we needed to “get small to grow big”.To understand what feature was going to make the biggest impact for our users, we produced a number of landing pages detailing a key feature and blasted them across our marketing channels. The results yielded quite a few surprises and ultimately led us to focus on game tracking as our primary feature for version one.

Moderation in all things. Moderating community-curated content.

PLAYDiT is community-driven. Anyone can submit a game consisting of a title, poster, wallpaper/background, tagline and description, a game platform, and an ESRB rating. Our stakeholders wanted to ensure we had the most accurate game data, which meant moderating every submission for maximum accuracy.I was tasked with designing software that allowed our moderators to moderate individually submitted pieces of content (a poster or description for example) and entire games with various amounts of data. The result was a streamlined process that allowed our moderators to select content from a queue and quickly determine if it adhered to our community rules.

Release the Kraken!! Unleashing the PLAYDiT brand and voice.

“We're thinking a squid or octopus. Oh, and it can't be purple. That's too much like Twitch”.For the logo I explored a bunch of different options and once again narrowed it down and presented 3 options, all inspired by the prompt they gave me. In the end, the tentacle with the game controller was chosen, refined and finalized. The “Gamer Gold” color evokes the achievements won in battle in your favorite games.

Final UI

What began as a quick concept designed to explore some of the visual possibilities quickly became the foundation for what we released for version one.With added focus on game tracking as the primary value add, I was able to take what had already been created and design highly detailed user experiences to help our users explore their gaming legacies. PLAYDiT is still in it's infancy, but our users already are tracking their games and building the database which gives us great hope to expand into additional features in the future.