Case Study

Playerstate

I led the design for a social gaming content creation platform by collecting user feedback, designing new features and validating them with user testing.

Playerstate enabled video game developers to increase engagement with their players with challenge and community tools.

Design process

Data

Through user feedback and interviews we identified what the platform was doing well and what it needed to improve on.

Design

Once the users problems were identified, solutions were designed and prototyped in Figma.

Test

User testing sessions were ran on each new feature to validate our solutions to the initial problem.

Introducing Playerstate

From 2021 to 2023, Playerstate was a prominent startup within Activate Studios' portfolio. Throughout this period, it hosted hundreds of challenges, engaging thousands of users and fostering deeper connections between video game creators and their players. The platform's innovative approach allowed game developers to issue a variety of challenges, ranging from fan art submissions and in-game clips to audio challenges, among others. This strategy not only provided game creators with valuable content for promoting their games and boosting community engagement but also enabled them to reward their community members with prizes for winning challenges.

My role

The start of my work as lead product designer on Playerstate coincided with the beta launch of its MVP. I was responsible for the entire design process from this point including collecting user feedback, designing solutions and then validating them through user testing. Towards the end of my time working on Playerstate I also led another designer as part of the team.

Challenge

The main challenge I faced working at Playerstate was to increase the engagement in challenges and social interaction on the platform. This was important for the growth of the platform to continue attracting more game creators to choose Playerstate to host challenges.

I tackled this in the following ways:

  • Creating a mobile version of the platform so users could access the platform from their most used device
  • Bringing challenges and submissions to the forefront of the platform with an improved explore page
  • Adding search and filtering to the platform to allow users to more easily find challenges and content that interest them
  • Improving the challenge page to make it clearer what prizes can be done and what they need to do
  • Improving the challenge submission flow to make it easier for the user to submit to the available challenges

These solutions led to a large increase in the number of submissions on the platform and a much larger active community.

The MVP of Playerstate was desktop only so one of my early tasks was creating a mobile version for the whole platform

The improved explore page brought challenges, communities and submissions to the forefront and created the possibility for promoted events.

The MVP of Playerstate had no search functionality so I designed and validated a solution which allowed users to find specific content faster.

The improved challenge page provided a more visual way of presenting a challenge with a large gallery section for inspiration and a large section featuring the challenge rewards.

The improved challenge submission flow gave users a quicker and more visual way of submitting their creations.

The improved submission modal utilised the entire screen to show the submission in its best light alongside the interaction from other users.

Client Feedback

Valon Statovci

Co-founder of Playerstate

Working with Jack was a pleasure. He had a clear focus on ensuring the design process was effective and well structured. He had a clear understanding of our vision and helped bring it to life in fantastic UI.

He was always keen to continously improve our product and processes and was a key member of the team!

Would highly recommend.

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