- UX Vision
- Employees seek to enrich their work experience. What if we could promote cross-company friendship by igniting passionate conversation during lunch?
Blizzard Entertainment · Looking for Lunch · Web App
Ignite passionate
conversation
- Who
- 4 member team project. Responsible for: research, interface, branding, documentation.
- What
- Group-maker tool for professionals.
- When
- Summer 2015.
- Where
- Corporate Applications, Blizzard Entertainment, Irvine, CA.




- Why?
-
That small town feeling
Since World of Warcraft, Blizzard Entertainment has grown tremendously. Executive management wants to bring back the small company feeling. This objective is called One Blizzard.
- And How?
-
Meet · Flexibility · One Blizzard
- Explore new horizons by meeting employees across Blizzard.
- Bring back the small company feeling - the One Blizzard vision.
- Meet and eat on the employee’s schedule.
Cross department social time
Looking for Lunch was initially developed in a Corporate Applications department hackathon by one of our mentors. He was inspired by One Blizzard, a company wide goal to break down department silos to promote better knowledge share and socialization between departments. A combination of past product leaks, selective employment and individual employee responsibility lead to cordoned off teams and departments within the company.
Users
3 personas
Decisions and personas
We conducted 20+ employee interviews to create our 3 personas. The product was designed with 2 of these personas in mind: the busy employee and incentivized. The coordinator was our 3rd persona with specialized needs. We decided to narrow our focus because we did not have the bandwidth to build a complete product for the coordinator persona during our internship. This was due to the coordinator needing scheduling, communication and administration tools for us to target effectively.

The Busy Employee
Break up the silos
Likes his team, but feels detached from the company. Small team sizes keep him busy. Doesn’t know everyone in his department due to fast expansion.

The Incentivized
Free swag? Sure!
Loves free Blizzard swag. She enjoys being social, but avoids the lunch time rush. She goes to the cafeteria early, usually leaving her alone at a table.

The Coordinator
Promote knowledge share
Connect individuals with similar skills. Does not see value in meeting random people. Speed up or remove the need for manual group setup.
User Journey
Mindsets and motivation
Holistic experience
We looked at the motivating factors that led users into the mindset of the product. We started with the first point of user engagement—the initial thought. From there we mapped the rest of the experience. An area of improvement which surfaced was communicating to users the likelyhood of being placed into a lunch group at the time(s) they signed up for. The user journey also facilitated the knowledge transfer at the end of the internship as we prepared to hand off our project to another team to complete.

Initial thought
The user has an initial thought triggering the problem space.

Feelings and motives
Certain feelings and/or motives place the user into the problem space.

Mental recall
The user recalls seeing posters in the cafe and/or hearing about it from coworkers.

Participation
He participates. The user is informed that he will receive an email when the group is created.

Uncertainty
Its an hour till lunch and they haven’t received an email. The user wonders if he will be grouped.

Realization
The email arrives! The user accepts the invitation and sends an email to the rest of the group.

Mealtime
The group decides to meet near the orc statue at the center of campus to carpool to lunch.

Feedback
The user receives an email survey after lunch asking about the overall experience.
Process
Photographic documentation

Participatory Design

Observations and Ideas

Affinity Diagram

Presenting the Design

Our Core
Wireframes, MVPs, Iterate, Final
Design worked a full sprint - 1 week - ahead of engineering, as we interviewed, wireframed and user tested a number of directions in order to hand off something solid to engineering by the end of the week. Our user tests were conducted within our department and with select interviewees spread across different teams. Visual research started early in development with the intent of avoiding bottlenecks as a number of people had to sign off on it.
Iteration
3 distinct versions

Wireframes
We tested around eight concepts around the office. The wireframes were interactable and represented the core flow of the design.

Initial MVP
We limited day selection to today and tomorrow to increase the chance of a lunch group being formed. We chose dropdowns to reduce cognitive load.

Expanded MVP
We choose to spice up the MVP with artwork from Overwatch.

Concept 1
We identified 7 major issues to fix. One of them was only being able to sign up for one day despite having both days to choose from on display.

Concept 2
This one is focused on readability. But there was an issue with the core design... do you need to fill out both days to enroll?

Concept 3
To reduce confusion, we moved away from showing both days to a dropdown. The user selects the day they're available, today or tomorrow.

Final design
The final utilizes space better than the previous concept. The result from our style meetings was to use Overwatch art, shown here.
Play
Style tiles
Styles tiles were created to communicate to the 3 project owners - of which only one was a designer - a look and feel upon which we could build on.
Getting the word out
Marketing materials
We created posters and trifolds to place in the campus cafeteria. We also prepared a company wide email blast for an executive to send for us. The visual system developed for the posters facilitated the creation of the final interface.
Takeaway
- Core Focus
- Coordinator persona is important, but required different feature set from other personas we did not have time for.
- Agile
- Our team conducted daily standups, sprint reflection and other Agile recommended affairs.
- Crunch
- Feedback required us to make a major design changes with 3 weeks left in the internship.
- Efficiency
- Multiple work projects meant that we needed to manage and split time efficiently.
Coming Soon