Competipal

5 min readAug 20, 2021

A UX Project Pitch

“Today, kids and adults can socialize with one another, in groups large and small, while playing games online. During the pandemic, connectivity stands out.

‘It’s all about the social interaction,’ says Isabela Granic, professor of developmental psychopathology at Radboud University, in the Netherlands. ‘You build your own gardens with other people. You play in teams overcoming other teams and militias and whatever it is. And it’s really checking a lot of those social needs in this time of isolation. And as much as kids need us, they need each other just as much.’ ” — TIME MAGAZINE (2020)

Multiplayer Online Games Bring Us Together

In a time of unprecedented isolation, people are looking for ways to connect with each other and socialize with those outside of their immediate homes.

Online games have provided this socialization and fostered connections between others while allowing them to stay safely quarantined. With so many various games, gaming platforms, schedules, and (let’s be honest) personality types, how do we find the right people to play with?

How can we connect with others who like the same things we do, live similar lifestyles and would genuinely be someone we want to hang out with and play games together?

Using existing technologies that have commonly been used for social networking and dating apps, we could similarly find our perfect gaming buddy (factoring qualifiers such as age, identified gender, games played, platforms owned, ratings and genre preferences, and more) and connect with others during an unprecedented time of isolation.

Project Plan and Development Cycle

Who Are the Users?

The users found me. More than ever before, existing socialization apps and gaming platforms were being flooded with people looking to connect. This problem kept growing as the pandemic progressed it seemed like more and more people were posting trying to find someone to hang out and play games with and who was compatible with them.

After watching all my various platforms and social media accounts blow up with people looking for people to socialize with and play with during the pandemic when we are all isolated and looking for that connection and enjoyment.

I reached out to several of these posters, so I could speak with them about what they were looking for, their gaming habits, their ideal gaming situations and experiences, and their ideal gaming buddy. I found out about their needs, expectations, wants, and distastes, and used this data to learn more about how to create a desirable matchmaking experience for them. I created three personas based on the users I interviewed that can be used as guiding lights throughout the development process.

Design Goals and Implications

After researching the current market, I was able to look at what has been done before to solve this user need and where my opportunities were for a new product that could best support our target users.

The opportunities I was able to identify were:

Merging the matchmaking and personalization concept of a dating app with in-game team matchmaking can allow all users to maximize their online play experience in all our games.
Large library of games to match players in, and a large audience of players to match with.
Expanding to being able to plan matchmaking outside of the game queue itself, allows for an increased opportunity of play and socialization.
More user friendly experience can improve matches and increase users on the service.

And I was able to define my user goals moving forward as:

Ability to match with people (18+) based on similar gaming habits and schedules
Ability to un-match and report previous matches to maintain a safe environment and improve matchmaking algorithms
Ability to define and share library of games and platform to use for matchmaking
Ability to socialize with matches in app before sharing additional contact/personal information

Designing the Experience

Next, I was able to design and identify the user journey and begin to wireframe and prototype that design intention using Miro.

Using Figma, I was able to begin wireframing and prototype design and start testing and beginning the design iteration process; designing, testing, iterating, and repeating.

Ultimately, creating higher fidelity and on-brand designs.

The Prototype Demo

Finally, after multiple rounds of testing and improvement, the prototype demo reached its current state, where a user can create a profile, and go through the experience of adding their preferences and making some matches.