Xbox Clubs

Duration: 6 months, 2016 | Role: Lead designer, interaction design

Xbox Clubs are gamer-created and -moderated groups that help you meet gamers and grow your gamer communities around specific interests.

01. Problem: Social gaming is not safe

Gamers want to have fun playing on Xbox Live. Unfortunately, they sometimes encounter harassment from people who think the network’s anonymity shields bad behavior.

02. Goal: Build a safe environemnt for social gaming

03. How: Use "place" metaphor to create experience in Xbox live

Why are social interactions safer in real life versus online gaming? Because the place where socializing happens in the real world is monitored. Place affects people's behavior via:

Ownership Places with "owners" are safer. Owners can ask people to leave the premises if they don't behave according to rules and norms.
Repeated visits People often return to places. The more they frequent a place, the more trust they have in it.

We start with a hypothesis: Once we build user-generated and user-managed clubs which mimic real world "places," users will naturally create safer social environments. The challenge is how do we create the feeling of a physical place in Xbox live? We first explored some obvious attributes of a "place:”

04. Framework: Translate "place" metaphor through wireframes

05. Research: What are social rules in xbox live?

To recreate the feeling of "places" in Xbox live, we wanted to establish social rules that mirror places in the real world. Often, those rules are created by a place owner to establish a unique social environment for the owner’s business or home. But what are those social rules in the gaming world?
Through secondary research, interviews, and testing, user researchers defined the following three categories of social rules. I used "tags" to apply those social rule categories to Xbox Live to make them easy to search, filter, and summarize. Also, at the very beginning, I associated fun emojis with the social rules, but through user testing, we found out that those emojis only added distractions rather than clarifications. So I used more simplified icons to represent those social rules so they could be noticed at a glance.

06. IA: Scope the work

When designing, I like to start from big picture and then hone in on the details of every aspect of a project. I think designing good consumer experiences requires answering three main questions.

1. How do users know about this product/experience
2. How do users interact with the product/ experience
3. How do users return back to the product/experience

After I established a design framework, I created an IA map to see where Xbox Clubs could fit and which user entry points we should focus on for the first and third questions.

07. Wireframes to prototypes: Solve cross-platform challenges

Creating the IA map for this project gave me the big picture view I needed to spot which areas of this project to tackle. Then, I dug in. For a multi-platform project like this one, I started by understanding the user journey and basic interaction details, such as navigation problems, one platform at a time. I could then expand my model to the other platforms.

Sometimes, one interaction pattern that works perfectly on one platform doesn't work on the others. For example, a chat forum works perfectly in a navigation bar on PC, but how can users quickly reply to chat messages on a gaming console? On a gaming console, users have to navigate step-by-step with a controller.

I explored different options. Below, I’ve outlined my reasoning that led to me choosing the last option for the design proposal.

After roughly identifying my design direction, I created a prototype to test user interaction and the overall look and feel.

08. One cohesive experience across platforms

A club owner creates a club

Club owner defines the type of club they want to establish, adds tags to represent how he wants the members to behave, and customizes the look of the club.

Others can discover a club through search or suggestions

Gamers can find a particular club by searching for its name or description. They can also filter for clubs using tags and game titles.

Play in the club

Club members can create a post to invite others to play with them in the future or they can create a party to start group play right away.

Communicate in the club

If a gamer is not available to play, he/she could just chat with the community and talk about shared interests.

Club moderators manage the club

Moderators of the club will manage communications and ban toxic gamers to make sure the club is a safe place for its members.

09. Impact

The whole project was released internationally in November,2016. There are ~4M unique club users, of which 2.5M were active in January,2017. Here are some quotes from Twitter and Reddit.