Ready to play more?
ONBOARD
Meet. Play. Connect.
Responsibilities: product | UX | UI Personal project
Let's play a board game
Board games become more and more popular. It has the power of connecting people, take them away from the screens to spend quality time together, like the good old days.
But there is still a problem, not everyone likes to play and it’s hard to find game partners nearby and make new connections. That's what Onboard put as it’s goal.
User Research
Understanding board gamers
To better understand users needs, I conducted a survey with the Israeli community of board games. I wanted to understand the current situation and the players pain points when looking for players to play with. 147 people answered the survey.
slide right to explore the main insights
Most of the people come to few public events, and then when they find some partners they prefer to play at one of their houses and stop coming to the public events.
Dorin (Public game events manager)
I think the most common one is that many girls will join a public game only if there is at least one more girl in the table.
Dorin (Public game events manager)
Market Research
Today, there is no solution for board game players
After understanding the users needs, I made a competitor and market research to see how other products tackled this problem or similar ones. I have explored many types of apps, from direct competitors to dating, finding roommates and hobbies partners, meetups, tasks manager and many more.
PAIN point #1
Get to the point
Long and exhausting onboarding process, some irrelevant questions and permission requests before understanding the app value.
PAIN point #2
Virtual world VS real world
In apps that are focused on online games partners, it’s not clear who created the board game, and a location doesn’t exist.
PAIN point #3
Build connections, not one time event
Apps that are not build on friendships. They are focused on public events only and requires host approval for every game.
PAIN point #4
Trying to solve too many problems
Apps that try to make a solution for many game types lack the crucial information of board games events, and are more complex to use.
What I have learned from similar fields apps
KEY LEARNING #1
Fast grow your friends network
In order to build a sufficient initial friends network, Facebook connect is a great method that should be used in the onboarding process.
KEY LEARNING #2
Friends are a game changer
Higher engagement rate to events can be achieved when one see first of all games that the his friends are going to.
KEY LEARNING #3
The minimal number is matter
For events that require minimal amount of guests in order to occur, It’s important to display this number, and not just the full capacity.
KEY LEARNING #4
Updates are a must
For every change of the event status or details, the user should be immediately updated via push notifications.
Information Architecture
Building the roots
Based on the insights gained from the research, I defined the architecture of the app. This step helps me to validate my solution before jumping to visual wireframes.
Wireframes
Visualize the solution
Once I was satisfied with the architecuture, I started to work on the user interface itself. I love to start with a low fidelty sketch before creating high fidelity wireframes and prototyping in axure.
Onboarding
Explore Games
Recommendations
Filtering
Game page
Create Game
My Games
Friends Network
Quick & short welcoming
To let other gamers know each other better, the user has to provide basic information in the onboarding step.All this information can be provided by Facebook connect, so in order to save some time he can connect with Facebook also during this step.
Usability Tests
See users in action
To test the user flow and the design I created Axure prototype and tested it with potential users.
The user flows and all the main actions were completed almost without any difficulties.
The only thing that most of the user didn’t understand was the location icons meaning. They didn’t understand that one represents a public place and one is a private place (home). I changed the public game icon and the second feedback was much better.
before
After
Design
Welcome to the dark side
The final step was to design the user interfaces. I decided to use dark colors that speak to gamers, together with visual elements from the world of gaming.
All the information you need at a glance
When entering a game page, the user can see right away all the game details, including the people that joined the game and how many are still missing. The user can join the game, invite a friend or chat with the group.