Background
Key Pain Points
- Reporting the results of a match is
- slow,
- error-prone,
- requires a printer and paper cutter,
- difficult to scale to larger event sizes, due to the staff needed to distribute and collect the paper result slips
- Informing players of their match pairings creates a problematic crowd-flow bottleneck around central lists of printed matches posted around the event area, especially as scale increases.
- Registering players takes time that limited local game store staff could be using to help paying customers complete their purchases.
From this, I decided to test transitioning away from printed communication entirely, instead imagining an integrated digital system for delivering and receiving match data via the new product. This system must:
- Allow for players to receive and send match data digitally, reducing the logistical burden of paper communication in events.
- Allow for retailers to register players faster, so they can focus on serving paying customers instead.
The scope of this solution was outside of the planned roadmap for EventLink, but I believed in the potential positive impacts of creating a two-product system and began work on a pitch for what would become Magic Companion, in my down-time.
Methods
Design Discovery
I started by mapping the User Journey of our Players and the Organizer personas through the process of a Magic event. The map I had already created for EventLink was primarily focused on the retailer persona and their experience running an event. For this User Journey diagram I went back over the data we had already collected and started looking at it from the Player perspective primarily. I made the following simplified User Journey Diagram, highlighting points where Players and Retailers communicate.
Companion User Journey Diagram
Prototype
Core Functionality
First, I defined the core testable functionality as features that directly addressed the pain points found in our research. They were:
- Allow players to join events using the Event Code.
- Allow players to learn who their opponent is via the app.
- Allow players to report the results of their matches via the app.
As this was a pitch prototype, I was free to imagine a future state of the product with a larger scope. I also included features with the following abilities:
- Allow players to find events near them using either a Search and Map feature.
- Allow players to save stores to view their events preferentially when searching for events.
- Allow a player to Host their own events from their phone.
With the go-ahead confirmed from our product leadership, I started work on a pitch prototype (see below).
Outcome
I drafted the initial product pitch and presented it to product, and eventually organization leadership and it was met with enthusiasm at each level, and the product was approved for initial development. I was still in charge of the EventLink design team and that was taking the majority of my time, so I instead helped hire and train a new designer to join 3 engineers on the brand new Magic Companion team.
Over the course of the next year, the Companion and EventLink teams worked in close collaboration to create a unified player-retailer experience. Companion was launched in early 2020 in advance of EventLink, and it was met with significant success. The broad acceptance of the new event management system lead to each of the stretch goals that were included in my original pitch (Event Search, Event Map, Host Mode) were eventually added to the full, feature complete Companion app.