Destiny Companion v2 iPad
Role: Project UX and UI Design
RESPONSIBLE FOR THE USER EXPERIENCE DESIGN, FEATURE DESIGN, AND UI DESIGN FOR THE COMPANION TABLET UPDATE
LEAD: DAVID SINCLAIR
PROBLEM:
The iOS app does not have a native iPad experience.
This was the big one. We had just come off of working for months on the Android update, kept up with the content of the game (two game updates), and were splitting the team into two halfs to perform more as an agile team.
Needless to say we, the two devs and myself, were still trying to juggle the amount of work needed to keep 2 android platforms, and iOS app, and a website afloat with the same feature sets.
FIRST SOLUTION:
Using what we learned from the Android development, we jumped into design meetings and wireframed out much of the same functionality and UX for the iPad app.
However, I spent more time prototyping and designing our new ribbon/tab navigation that has become the norm for iOS in general. This was a bigger task than anyone realized.
Problem:
Features in the app do not bucket together well and have overlap.
Sub Problem:
No one involved in the design could come to an agreement of the arrangement of the app because of different perspectives on who uses the app - hardcore/power users vs. causal.
SOLUTION:
We never did actually come to a refined agreement on how we all saw the app being used. We had at our disposal a mountain of data to support our decisions, but it really depended on interpretation of that data. Kind of like reading hieroglyphics. It's all in how you read it.
This did gave us an insight into what the basic spring off points for the app should be. Each of these sections had a fundamental guiding principle behind it that kept us honest about what features fell under what category.
- Legend - My game progression
- Community - I want to play with friends
- Destiny - What's going on in the world of Destiny
- App Level Stuff - Settings and other app features
- More - Everything else
Our new navigation followed those categories.
