Skillz is an SDK for game developers that allow users to play casual mobile games competitively. The developer console is a dashboard where game developers can integrate and maintain their game. One of the biggest features on the developer console is the Integration Verification Tool (IVT). IVT is the starting point for all developers to get on to the Skillz platform.
Skillz
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Role
Product Designer -
Duration
3 Months -
Cross-Team
2 PMs2 Engineers1 QA Engineer
Project Success:
From 1 game launched per month, we took that number and increased it to 7 games launched per month. The first 3 months of the project launch, we had 22 games launched in total.
Project Overview:
Skillz gets hundreds of game developer signups each month. However, when we looked into the integrated games, we only saw 1% of those signups successfully integrated their game on our platform. It was definitely not meeting our expectations for conversion. We were not able to track exactly where the drop offs happen. We wanted to understand why the conversion rate was low and when were these game developers were leaving the integration process.
Research & Discovery
When I was sourcing developers, I made sure we had a variety of developers in different phases of the integration. I was looking for developers who were successful in their integration, and some still going through the the integration tool we call the, the IVT (Integration Verification Tool). Our questions were based on our hypotheses we came up with during our IVT audit.
Hypotheses
- Configuring their game into the SDK took a lot of time to complete
- The instructions were too complicated, confusing the developers
- UI elements were adding to the confusion of the process
Design Sprint
After analyzing the data we took from the research, we wanted to bring it in front of the product team, to brainstorm on possible solutions. We held a design sprint to come up with several solutions on how we can solve these pain points.
Main Takeaway
User and Usability Testing
In the beginning of the research, after interviewing the developers we asked them to go through the current IVT. This was so that we can focus on the pain points.
After the design sprint, we had some solutions to bring to the same developers we spoke with.
Main Takeaway
- Configuring their game into the SDK took a lot of time to complete
- The instructions were too complicated, confusing the developers
- UI elements were adding to the confusion of the process
Defining the Roadmap
We needed to get stakeholder buy-in for our vision of the developer console and to make sure the business goals aligned with what we are trying to build. I created a “realistic fiction” page on the IVT flow to show our leadership team what the developer console can potentially look like in the future.
We got the buy-in when we showed this page. What stood out the most to our leadership team was the gamification element with the progress bar. This also paved the way into getting a go signal to update the UI elements in the console. Our goal was to ship an MVP of the entire IVT flow and slowly build out each task to evolve into a workspace type of tool.
Solution in Content
The layout and the structure of the integration process was coming along, we needed the content to align with our new layout. One of our hypotheses was that configuring the game after integrating the SDK took a lot of time to finish. We worked with other teams within Skillz that interact with game developers daily to see how we can provide the best content. We restructured the steps and created three main buckets to categorize them: Integrate, Configure, and Publish. We worked with the engineering team to see if we could remove some repetitive information and save it locally so we did not have to keep asking them for the same things over and over again.
Solution in Visual Design
Updating the side bar was the biggest overhaul for this project. Adding visual indicators, like colors on the sidebar to show if the task is completed, in progress or not validated. With this solution, there is less confusion as the developers go through the process. This was laying the foundation of eventually gamifying the entire developer console.