Game On!

Design an app and a responsive website for an arcade. Allow sign-up and check-in for special events.

Who

Arcade customers and other gamers!

What

Allow arcade patrons to sign up to participate in events, attend events, reserve games and spaces, and more. Include an employee portal for checking into events.

Why

Improve customer experience and communication among customers and employees.

Initial Thoughts & Wireframes

I decided to begin this project by doing a competitive audit so that I could see what other arcades have done with their processes. From here, I created a sitemap as a starting point. The overall sitemap did eventually change, but it was a helpful start.

I knew these were my initial primary goals:

  • Allow for event sign-up

  • Notification for new events

  • Allow for communication among users (13+)

  • Employee portal for event check-in, communication & member moderation

I want this design to include mobile, tablet, and desktop, so I've decided to utilize a progressive enhancement process and begin with designing for mobile before transitioning to tablet, and finally, desktop.

As opposed to previous projects, I decided to try out skipping the initial sketches and move straight to digital wireframes. I am often more comfortable with brainstorming in a digital format, so this seemed to work really well for me.

Lo-Fi Prototypes & User Feedback

Feedback from users included:

  • Move Employee Portal to Account page and only available to employees.

  • Allow for event registration from mobile Home.

  • Add Video Games to Games.

  • Reorganize Event Registrations, Favorite Games, and Badges to be consistent on various profile views & devices.

  • Incomplete processes.

The ‘Final’ Design… for now

I knew that I wanted to do a darker default color scheme, but I didn’t know what accent color I wanted to use. I tried out a couple of different options - one blue, one green. I found pretty quickly that the green did weird things to my eyes and was really difficult to look at, so I went with the blue.

  • Moved Employee Portal to Account page and only available to employees.

  • Added Video Games.

  • Added Participate and Spectate buttons for event registration from Mobile Home.

  • Tightened up user flows a bit - it’s definitely still not complete, but better.

Conclusion

I had a lot of fun with this project! I think skipping the sketching step worked out okay for me, but it also may have inhibited looking at other ideas. My brain works in such a strange way here - I picture various options in my mind and rule out them out quickly based on different variables and sketching often seems like an unnecessary step in the process because of it. I think I need to reframe this my mind somehow.

As I revisit this project in the future, I hope to finish out the following user flows:  

  • Community Search 

  • Community Topics 

  • Expand announcements 

  • Settings  

  • New Event  

  • Event Check in  

  • Followers/Following Lists 

  • Warn or Ban