Blizzard Battle.net Friends Events

Diving deeper

[Conducted initial research by analyzing past social gaming user research, competitive analysis, and conducting a user research study with four users. Found that battle.net is seen as a game hub, not a communication platform]

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We first dug into initial, existing user research that had been made in the past to understand socials within battle.net, as well as past explorations others had done before us.

We found that...

• Most people want to play social most of the time
• The chat is mostly used for coordinating and initiating gameplay most of the time instead of for communication
• Battle.net is a game hub, not a communication platform with the majority of users simply opening battle.net and press play
• Social engagement happens when gameplay is organized...but this happens outside of Battle.net, such as on Discord

So we were asking ourselves: Where can we add value?

We know that if people communicate on battle.net, they do it to initiate gameplay.

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User Interviews

We decided to conduct user interviews to learn more about the user's problems and needs. Four user interviews were conducted with Overwatch and WoW players. Some things we specifically looked at here were to:

• Find out how players who don't have a dedicated friends group to play with find friends to play with, how they interact with them and how they currently use the battle.net social features to do so.
• Shed light on how our players mentally group their Battle.net friends into different sub-categories and what implications this has on the way they interact.
• Define the pain points players currently experience when finding friends, interacting with friends and initiating gameplay with friends.
• Uncover latent needs and behaviors of users that influence how they engage in gameplay with others.

Research Insights - Quotes

💬 "I would only play regularly with others if it would not be a hassle to hit them up" “ I just ask 'Play?' in the chat group or on discord. They reply 'yeah in 30 minutes'"

💬 "I said “hey if anyone is available to play overwatch right now hit me up!" and waited a bit for responses, then hopped in game”

💬 “I want a quick reply”

💬 "I don't actually remember if Treaked13 is the right role. I actually downloaded an add on that would allow me to differentiate between roles”

💬 "I write “hey, invites going out in 10 minutes". I don’t have enough information on the "commoners" in my friends list to invite them”

💬 “There is this social awkwardness of reintroducing myself”

💬 “I would feel more comfortable reaching out if I knew knew they were playing solo/not grouped up with anyone right now”

Defining user problems

[Identified Barriers of Information and Vulnerability as the most pressing user problems, by using an affinity map. Empathized with the user by creating user journeys]

The goal of our research was to find a latent user problem in regards to battle.net's socials that we would attempt to solve. To synthesize our findings, we created user journeys based on the interviews we conducted. Our most important insights were (from the user's perspective):

1. Organizing social play is easier on Discord, especially for friends outside of core-group
2. I am closer with friends that I know more about and vice versa
3. Solo-play is a suboptimal gaming experience
4. Knowing preferences of my friend would make me more inclined to play with them
5. There is a lot of social awkwardness and vulnerability involved in reaching out to friends I don’t have much information about
6. I’ll only reach out to my friends when it’s convenient and chance of rejection is low

We used an affinity diagram to group all the insights and quotes we had gathered from our research to derive the two most pressing (based on extensive feedback and group discussions with Designers and PM's) user problems:

Barriers of Information - Many social users are hesitant to engage in gameplay with friends on Battle.net because they lack information and context about their friend’s preferences and availability (such as willingness to play, preferred game, role, ect.).

Social Awkwardness & Vulnerability - Users experience social awkwardness and vulnerability associated with reaching out to lesser known friends, which inhibits social interaction.

We also visualized the journey our players take when engaging in multiplayer mode to understand their behavior and use of the app. By doing that, we identified three different types of players which helped me empathize with the users we are designing for. The social gamer is the most common one:

Narrowing down solutions

[Ideated solutions to solve user problems and narrowed them down to a Friends Events Feature and a Customizable Friends List]

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Based on the user problems we uncovered, we derived a hypothesis:

If we were to build a feature that encourages users to play more with non core-group friends, we would shift a substantial portion of social gaming activity to Battle.net from third party social platforms, increasing Battle.net’s network effect and stickiness.

To pursue this goal, we broadened our horizons again and ideated several different ideas on how we could improve social engagement in battle.net while aiding the user in their experienced social awkwardness and breaking down information barriers.

A Reality Check

After an extensive discussion about the amount of value each of our possible solution ideas brought to the user, we narrowed our list of ideas down. A feedback session with lead engineers helped us do that, since we scratched all the ideas that were out of the scope because they would only come with several years of development time, and dependence from all five game teams.

In a dot-voting session, we first assigned each of our ideas a weight, based on the quantity of user problems it solves, and how much user value a solution would bring. Then, we invited our co-workers for a session to vote on which idea they would like to pursue most. Below you can see the five ideas we identified as being most successful at solving all or some of above described user problems.

We approached our ideation process having in mind exactly what the users needed to be able to do and keeping close attention to the "how might we statements" that were based on user problems we uncovered during our research. We then identified the two most promising ideas whose solutions have the potential of providing the user with the highest value. Our two initial ideas, friends events and customizable friends list address most of the user problems by breaking down information barriers and bridging vulnerability:

Idea 1: Friends Events (Allowing the user to schedule events with friends or groups of friends) - By implementing a way for users to schedule play sessions and friend events in advance, we can reduce the uncertainty and vulnerability that makes users hesitant to initiate social play, reduce the time wasted assembling a group ad-hoc, and cultivate a stronger sense of community on the App.

Idea 2: Customizable Friends Lists - By moving Groups to the friends list, users can associate friends with the groups they share, providing friend information and context in an unobtrusive, organic way while simultaneously bringing far greater feature visibility and relevance to Groups.

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Building a Friends Events feature

[Fleshed out our ideas by creating flows and clickable prototypes of our feature ideas to take to user testing]

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Since both ideas were promising, we wanted to test them with users before narrowing it down to one to further pursue. For this purpose, I created flows and prototypes of both ideas in Figma. For the friends events feature, we also built two slightly different versions that differ in how a user can access the calendar feature.

After initial sketches, we did rapid prototyping. Battle.net has an extensive design system, so I was able to quickly prototype from my sketches in Figma. Regardless, we did several iterations of our designs and I created completely new elements, such as the calendar feature and some buttons.

In hindsight, I would have created a low-fidelity prototype in Figma - outside of the design system - first. I feel like it would have allowed us to complete testing-iteration cycles quicker.

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Friends Events Feature Main Functionality

• The friends events feature mainly lives in the chat window, as this is where users initiate gameplay
• The feature further facilitates the underused, existing group feature
• Users are now able to schedule game events with individuals or groups in their friends list
• Implements a calendar button into battle.net's friends list bar that opens to a calendar view for overview and scheduling of events
• Creation/cancellation of game events
• Sending invitation to game events in chat
• Accept and decline game event and view attendees in group chat window
• Notifications about upcoming and missed events

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Custom Friends List Main Functionality

View flows of custom friends list idea here

• Option to highly customize existing friends list into meaningful buckets by incorporating dropdown menu to friends list headers
• Create friends category
• Delete friends category
• Rename friends category
• Rearrange friends

Validating UX with users

[Did usability testing of prototypes and further research with four users. Chose to further pursue the Friends Events feature after testing and analysis showed feature to be more impactful on user experience]

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We took into account three aspects of testing:

1. Validating functionality/ideas
2. Generating feedback to pursue one of the two ideas further and create a high-fi prototype
3. Since we were already leaning towards pursuing event scheduling due to it's higher user value, we wanted to see if there were aspects about the idea of an event scheduler that the user expected that were missing

We then created an extensive usability testing script where we presented four users with different scenarios of essential tasks that they had to complete within our prototype. Afterwards, we analyzed patterns in the data we obtained to see if there were aspects of the prototypes that users struggled with.

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Key findings (UX problems)

Friends Events + Groups

• User's first instinct to do event-related tasks was to open the calendar view. User views, such as new event creation/editing or invitation, that did not directly go through the calendar window, were most unintuitive to users.
• People had a hard time finding events specifically related to a group
• Users would always try to and additional information about the events.
• The primary intuition of users was to invite friends through the calendar.
• The idea that events would be tied to groups was confusing and unintuitive. Users wanted to invite both groups and friends to their events.

Customizable Friends List

• Users were caught off guard when the new category they created appeared at the bottom of the list. They expected it to appear close to the three dots that they clicked on.
• User's intuition was to drag friends between categories to rearrange them.
  Users were concerned about what would happen if they deleted their last category.

At this point, we wanted to determine which aspect of our rapid prototyping brings more value to the user. Based on the user feedback from usability testing, we decided to pursue only one idea for iteration.

We decided to pursue the Friends Events idea, since our research showed it provided more user value.

💬 Further justification: “Despite feature visibility and in turn usage likely being low with Event Scheduling, we believe, through user research and usability testing, that the user value of Events is very high for those that choose to use it. Additionally, Event Scheduling functionality is currently not implemented in other major game launchers, and can give us a competitive advantage in the space. We also predict that Event Scheduling's usage will increase over time, as we improve visibility and functionality surrounding Groups."

A new calendar view

[Analysis of insights from user testing showed that the calendar window needs to be the central hub of the friends events feature. Implemented changes into a new calendar window, which is currently mid-fi. We decided to do MVP testing before moving to hi-fi]

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We implemented feedback from our usability testing (see key insights above), other designers and lead engineers into the Friends Events idea and created new flows. These iterations include small changes directly implemented into the prototype, as well as a re-designed, mid-fidelity calendar window.

The most important changes from the first iteration were an improved calendar window and making the calendar the central hub of event creation. We also provided the player with more detailed and relevant information about each event.

As a next step, the newly implemented changes will be incorporated in a higher fidelity fashion and animated for testing.

Proof of concept, MVP and High-Fi

[High-Fi prototype, further testing to see if our feature measurably raises social engagement, and MVP version of a Friends Events feature]

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We decided that the next step will be an MVP version as a proof of concept to gather data about whether the user uses the scheduling feature sufficiently. This will have two parts: MVP 1 will be a stripped down version of a calendar functionality, such as a third-party integration or a button in the battle.net Beta version that will lead to the website When2Meet or a different simplified version of our feature. MVP 2 will be an "invite to play" button, that allows users to send a pre-defined message with a game link to friends. This allows us to measure both the use of a calendar feature and if this makes users interact more with their friends (statistically, any difference between these two prototypes will be causal).

In addition to this, if the internship would have been longer, we would incorporate the iterations into the clickable prototype to go into another round of usability testing and gather additional feedback on the full functionality of the friends events feature.