The Savvy Gaming Group has tapped Monstarlab to design and develop its cutting-edge NINE66 platform. This comes at a time when Saudi Arabia is pushing to become a global hub for the gaming industry by 2030. With the help of Monstarlab, Savvy Gaming Group is positioning itself to be at the forefront of this rapidly growing market.
The game development industry is evolving enormously as new games, jobs, and services are introduced every day. But it is an immature industry trying to find its place. As a result, there isn't a unified place to gather the stakeholders. Instead, different platforms are used for various means, leaving a scattered and disconnected community behind.
Nine66 is a one-stop-shop created for the game development industry. It is an ecosystem of end-2-end services, capturing both supply and demand with the objective of gathering stakeholders in one place. The purpose is to connect and engage stakeholders across the globe to create value for all members of the community.
Our internal team consists of 24 people – 8 Developers, 5 Designers, 3 QA engineers, 2 Strategists, 2 Product Managers, a Project Manager, an Engagement Director, a Solution Architect, and a Scrum Master. My role is to lead the user interface design, plan tasks and feedback for two mid-level designers, and communicate with C-level stakeholders.
Wireframing
Mockups
Prototyping
Competitive analysis
Usability testing
Feedback mapping
Rapid prototyping
User flows
Information architecture
Design system
Hi-fidelity designs
Interactive prototypes
Stakeholder reviews
Iterations
Detail fixing & polishing
I was given the opportunity to join this project after the Experience and Strategy team had already held a few workshops with the client, defining the vision and key features of the platform. In a short time - less than one month - I created an extensive prototype of a user journey, determined the product's visual language, designed over 50 high-fidelity desktop screens, revised five main sections multiple times, received approval of the visual direction from the client, established a base for the design system, and aided in the usability testing.
Apart from the data we received from the client's questionnaire, we didn't have any proof that the problems we were trying to solve actually existed. So we used qualitative and moderated remote testing with 15 participants from various fields of game development - actual developers, designers, entrepreneurs, and people not directly related to this industry, like graphic designers or marketers. Initially, we wanted to understand peoples' current behaviors and the problems they have been facing throughout their careers.
1. Users feel they don't have a platform dedicated to their job market.
2. Business knowledge in the game industry is scarce.
3. Getting the right education is a challenge
4. Users want to know how to acquire funding.
5. Finding quality industry talent is a challenge
The goal of the onboarding was to make the process of creating an account as smooth as possible, whilst gathering important information about the user in order to suggest relevant content throughout the platform.
The activity feed is a central place where users can find the content from all platform sections. The feed lets the user view the content in the following, popular, or my activity tab. I suggested having an activity tab as we descoped in-platform notifications. Hence, the user has a central place with all his/hers activities like comments, likes, or posts to keep track of recent activity, since we only have email notifications in the MVP. Four types of content will be present in the feed – questions, posts, showcases, and promoted content like courses or ads.
Discover is a place where people can find all the showcases present on the platform. They can filter by an extensive tagging system which is used to manage content throughout the site.
The goal of the showcase is to give game developers and all professions associated with game creation space to present their work, as there is currently no platform that would solve this need. Unfortunately, because of a tight deadline, we couldn't offer a complex modular approach, as seen in the prototype. Still, we believe that a rich text editor will give our users enough tools to present their work. On the other hand, we decided to limit the options of free text editor in terms of fonts, font sizes, and colors to ensure visual consistency throughout the platform.
The User's Profile is one of the essential sections on the platform as we hope that in future releases, it could substitute a traditional portfolio website, which will be a powerful combination with the Job Board. Currently, you can find a cover picture, profile picture, profession tags, experience tags, bio, and showcases. The project profile has a very similar layout and feature set; the only difference is that multiple users, or creators as we call them, can collaborate in creating a showcase or work on various templates.
The purpose of the workspace is to be an interactive space where users can advance their projects. Users could work as individuals, collaborate with teams, or whoever they want to invite to their workspace. The workspace could contain a range of interactive templates that they could apply to outline their business. Templates could range from strategy to business model, to pitch deck to game design document.
NINE66 is my first project with such a large team and also a first project where I had a chance to lead multiple designers. I was fortunate to get this opportunity as I feel like this platform will help game developers improve their prospects and chances to succeed in the gaming industry. The biggest challenge of this project is a very tight deadline which puts the whole team in a very performance-demanding position.
Running a project using an Agile approach presented many challenges, with design and development teams having to start simultaneously. It was difficult to keep track of design changes from the client and developers, organize files and documentation, plan design tasks, and attend multiple meetings daily while being ultimately responsible for the final deliverables.
To combat this, I delegated some of the tasks to other team members, which gave me more time for production. This taught me the importance of trusting my teammates and not trying to do everything alone.
With the tight deadline, I also learned how to prioritize tasks and compromise on features that bring the most value with the least impact on the development time.
