• Showcase
  • One Blizzard
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  • Iteration
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  • Takeaway

Blizzard Entertainment · Looking for Lunch · Web App
Ignite passionate
conversation

UX Vision
Employees seek to enrich their work experience. What if we could promote cross-company friendship by igniting passionate conversation during lunch?
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.
Sign Up Selection Review Review

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.

Knowledge Share

The goal of One Blizzard is to promote knowledge share and socialization between departments.

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.

Desire

Interviewees were receptive to the idea of meeting new people during the lunch hour.

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.

\ 3
The Busy Employee
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
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
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

\ 9

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.

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

The user has an initial thought triggering the problem space.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The user receives an email survey after lunch asking about the overall experience.

Process

Photographic documentation

\ 5
Participatory Design
Participatory Design
Observations and Ideas
Observations and Ideas
Affinity Diagram
Affinity Diagram
Presenting the Design
Presenting the Design
Our Core
Our Core

Insight

Random is rare - it is not necessarily useful.

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

\ 7
Early Stages
Wireframes

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

Early Stages
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.

Early Stages
Expanded MVP

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

Early Stages
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.

Early Stages
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?

Early Stages
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.

Early Stages
Final design

The final utilizes space better than the previous concept. The result from our style meetings was to use Overwatch art, shown here.

Spreading the Word

We created materials to spread the word about Looking for Lunch to the company.

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.

The End

Looking for Lunch is a great example of what can be achieved by the internship program.
-Executive Team

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.

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