Sector - N/A
Timeframe - 1 week
Deliverables - User journey, Sketched wireframes, Final UI (mobile)
Methods - Secondary research, Heuristic analysis, Design thinking ideation
This was a self-initiated brief for Boomerang, a games rental website. Having used their service before, I felt the interface, & even some of the journey itself could do with much improvement.
The process:
This step was undertaken mainly to show why I thought this interface could be improved. As you'll see below, screenshots of three core site pages annotated with my thoughts on specific elements. Since the site wasn't mobile-friendly at the time, my analysis was on the desktop version.
Bearing in mind the existing design will have had various budgetary constraints. For the purpose of achieving the best outcome, my redesign assumes these limitations are minimal.
Since there were no stakeholders in this instance, I had to make some logical assumptions based on what I could gather myself.
Firstly I aimed to answer the two most important questions at the start of any project:
Provide a tailored experience to replace buying new games outright, for a more economical way of gaming.
Secondary research from ukie.org.uk/research & newzoo.com/insights.
Although predominantly male oriented, quite an even split between the sexes. Bearing in mind quite a lot of spare time is needed to make the most of this service, it is more viable to the 15-24 age bracket, living at home, & likely to have less time-consuming responsibilities.
A couple of interesting takeaways were that, more women are likely to play games than men, but of all those that do, men play more frequently. Also, that gamers are statistically greater consumers of culture, reading, attending arts/performances.
Before undertaking any design work I wanted to visualise the typical user journey, with accompanying 'How Might We..' post-its (shown adjacent). An important exercise which gave me a reference point for the entirety of the project.
-opt.jpeg)
I started with a couple of sets of Crazy 8's to get as many rough ideas down as possible. Then sketched more considered variations of the core screens, before deciding on the strongest collectively. This formed my (low fidelity) wireframes.
A fundamental change I made was to categorise the rental packages for a more progressive user journey. There is no need for a user to compare all of them at once as each type of person would only be considering 3-4 depending on their budget, time spent gaming etc.
Another important feature was the ability to filter and sort games via several variables when browsing. With 1000's of titles, the existing site was not addressing this, thereby forcing a tedious process for the user.
Boomerang's brand palette is quite limited to mainly greys and I didn't want to add unnecessary colour for the sake of it. Particularly when it comes to screens that include game cover thumbnails - I didn't want the interface to compete visually in any way.
You can see a selection of mobile screens below. I carefully implemented alignment & proximity to do the hard work. Also making a conscious effort to put CTAs in the lower third of the screen for easy thumb use.
