Understanding the User
Who Are Our Users?
To try to figure out who would use a DLE aggregator platform, I sent out an anonymous survey form to online communities, organizations, and networks of friends and their families.
I received a whopping 60+ survey responses and distilled that information into a few categories of people I might interview.
I interviewed six people individually and recorded what they said, what they thought, what they felt, and what they did.
I then used empathy mapping to try to understand patterns of thought and any points of frustration.
Meet the Users
Creating the empathy map helped me better understand the different archetypes of DLE players and their potential motivations for using the DLE aggregator. Here are the three personas that emerged from the user research:
How Might Users Interact With the Aggregator?
In order to better understand how each user persona might interact with the aggregator, I stepped into the minds of each of them and created user journey maps. For brevity, here is the journey map for Cassandra, the casual player.
Key Insights from the "Empathize" Phase
Stepping through the user journeys for all three personas helped me understand what pitfalls and opportunities to look out for when I begin to design the aggregator.
Here are the major insights I gleaned from this phase of the design process:
1. Discoverability
Users want an easy way to discover new and good quality DLEs. Let’s implement a well-organized catalog with sorting abilities like categories and tags.
2. Bookkeeping
Users want to be able to save their favorite games in a bookmarks tab, for ease of access and to avoid forgetting new games they enjoy.
3. Minimizing Friction
A huge majority of users do not want to make an account or download an app for this. A website that saves information locally is preferable to one that requires a login or a native app.
Next, let's take the insights from this first phase of the design process and re-examine our problem and goal.
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