The Walking Dead: Road to Survival
Scopely hired me to plug into their partner game development studio, IUGO, to provide useful and meaningful feedback on current projects, and at the same time get a handle on some very large spec documents. I was based in Athens, GA at the time, and worked remotely alongside a team in LA, and a team in Vancouver BC. I flew to meet each team once a month.
This was also IUGO's first time working with a UX/Product Designer with tools like rapid prototyping and other lean UX approaches. I also had a hidden agenda, driven by Scopely, to help IUGO be able to deliver features more quickly. I was asked to assess and validate the existing concepts for the very complicated "Faction Territories" feature. The challenge was to assess an already delivered 20+ page spec document and take it to completion.
As a Lean UX advocate, I encouraged both Scopely & IUGO to take a leaner approach, exposing them both to design thinking workshops & cross-functional collaboration. They loved the results and benefitted from the exposure to lean methods. Both teams benefitted from adjusting their processes to be leaner and user-focused.
After working with them to flesh out Faction Territories, I moved on to help them with several other large features as well, and when they hired another UX designer on-staff, I helped to integrate her into the team and set her up for success.
We’re better together
While working with the two teams, I was able to identify breakdowns in communication between Scopely and IUGO, and made recommendations on new processes that would set everyone up for better success and collaboration.
I introduced the "Business Model Canvas" as a way that Scopely could better identify the Who, What, Why. IUGO could then review and contribute to these before any final direction was set. As a result, both teams grew to feel more invested in the product and found a shared understanding.
IUGO was introduced to story mapping for the first time which helped them craft better proposals for Scopely. I also encouraged Scopely to deliver less strict requirements to IUGO, so they could have the flexibility to workshop solutions.
Crafting a new vision for Faction Territories
After our workshop, we had a much better understanding of the features we were designing and could break out the spec work into iterations rather than in one giant document.
I worked with engineers to iterate on various UI interface layouts, states, and screen flows. I had to work out some very complicated flows and states across multiple users. I helped to identify all of the screens that we needed to design across all of the states.
Testing concepts with real gamers
In order to test these concepts, I worked closely with Scopely’s on-staff researchers to put working prototypes in front of real gamers. Interactions were built in Proto-io and Sketch.
I worked scrappily and quickly to produce many testable wireframes so that I could gather feedback rapidly to inform design.
Results
Faction Territories was successfully launched to the active gaming community playing the walking dead games. The team was happy with the process, and I worked with them to develop many more features during my time with the team.
