Big Fish Games
Kraken - Navigation

Helping users find their way

Overview

Kraken is a communication and event management solution for casual mobile games at Big Fish Games. It supports multiple games with multiple development environments.

Stakeholders

Producers, Product Managers, Marketing Managers, Engineers and Quality Assurance Testers

Problem

Expanding the drawer component to include new Admin pages, impacted the users visibility of system status

Role(s) Played

Conduct interviews to inform and provide Engineering and Product Managers with designs

Activities Performed

Usability testing, information architecture, wireframes

Usability Testing

Identified and interviewed 5 Stakeholders with Admin level permission

Goal:
Validate that the drawer component could support the new admin pages

Usability Tasks included:

  • Creating a new team
  • Editing an existing app
  • Adding new team members to existing teams

Identified Issues

User Control - Users were navigating to their desired tool before selecting their Team and App

Consistency and standards - Users commented on why they needed to select a team when attempting to create a new team

Exploration with Engineering

Working with engineering we explored ideas and solutions on how to solve for the identified issues

  • Identified possible solutions
  • Updated tool logic
  • Breadcrumb idea

Proposed Information Architecture Changes

Problem: Team and App selection was not needed for some pages and impacted user control and freedom

Solution:Remove the Team and App page and surface to the user as a modal when selecting the page

Dashboard Design

Drawer component used to combine both information and navigational links

Adding an app bar gave the user contextual information and utility based off the page selected

  1. Page Name: Page Name: To improve the sense of direction within the page we wanted to identify the name of the page
  2. Team and App: All users Users can quickly identify which team and app is selected. Also give the utility to switch either apps or teams
  3. Drawer: The drawer is now reserved for navigational page links

Modal Design

Requesting team and app information immediately after signing in did not align with users goals

Adding contextual modals based off page selection, allowed the page to display the required information at the right time

  • Team and App
  • Team only
  • No modal

Conclusion

  • This project came to a bitter and abrupt end as the project was cancelled
  • Usability testing proved the designs successful by 150%
  • Next steps would have included a continue support to the Kraken Navigation by adding more features to the tool

What I learned

  • While working with an agile methodology it is important to test your navigation and improve the information architecture when necessary
  • Working with an engineering team that works on other products at any given time require more planning for MVP and beyond
  • Introducing multiple permission levels complicate the expected user flows
  • Going back to the project, I would have further explored the flow of the user attempting to abandon the modal