Introduction
Smite is a multiplayer online battle arena video game for PC and Xbox One that allows players to choose from 1 of 72 gods to take into Battle against each other. As part of a three-person team, our challenge was to come up with new ways to engage players while away from the game or to augment their gaming experience.
My Role:
Project management, qualitative research, synthesizing our interview & user test notes, affinity mapping, feature prioritization, userflows, sketching and whiteboarding, paper prototype in Marvel, high-fidelity prototype in Marvel, graphics in Photoshop.
Discovery
Smite is not an easy game to play nor understand – even an avid Smite player will tell you this – the barrier to entry is high! So before any real work could begin I had to get intimately acquainted with the game. This meant playing the video game to a certain minimum level of proficiency (I AM NOT A GAMER) and scouring gaming forums for as much information as I could get so that I could ask the right questions of users later.
“If my friends were playing the Hello Kitty Adventure Island game, then I would be on it all the time too!”
Smite PlayerGuerrilla Research
To get to know Smite players, we wanted to meet them on their turf so we went to Battle & Brew, a local gaming bar that also happens to sponsor professional Smite Team players — we got lucky! So in exchange for a FREE BEER per interview, we gathered hours worth of information. We found out what motivated them, what bothered them and lots of ideas for enhancing their overall gaming experience.
Our Key Takeaways:
- Smite was a key aspect of their social life. Their online friends became their real life friends and vice-versa. One burley interviewee even said,”If my friends were playing the Hello Kitty Adventure Island game, then I would be on it all the time too!
- They are highly selective with whom they play in-game. There is a code for your behavior and if you don’t play nice – if you “rage”- then you’re out.
- Setting up gameplay for later was a particular pain-point. Users mentioned using, Facebook, text messaging, Twitter, Curse and even Skype to arrange a game! When one user talked us through his process he actually said, “ seems a bit complicated…”
We decided to focus on enhancing the social aspects of playing Smite for our project.
Affinity Mapping & Feature Prioritization
We went back through all of our interviews and we compiled a master wish list of all the features these players wanted to see as they related to social aspects of playing Smite. We then isolated recurring themes and prioritized them according to business, user and brand goals.
We decided to focus on giving users an easier way to communicate, friend, and group chat within the app.
Use Cases
Existing In-Game Communication
We studied the way players communicate during a game with the built-in chat system. We set out to recreate their in-game communication experience — we wanted to pull these key features that they were already using and familiar with and put it them in the users pockets outside of the game.
Sitemap with New Features
Lo-Fidelity Wireframes: Axure
