It’s Time for Design
We just launched our first paid feature in The Play Valet: you can now invite the other players by email, and vote on all of your games, together!
This is a huge milestone for us, but can we do better? Can the Valet be a better value to its users—and now its customers?
When a team builds a mobile application, any new feature is likely to go through many different pairs of hands:
A product manager—or similar role, as none of this is 100% consistent from team to team—defines what the new feature is and how it fits in with the rest of the app.
A user experience designer explains how users will first discover the new feature, then understand how that feature works, and then actually interact with it.
A user interface designer lays out the look and feel of the new UI elements: buttons, text, etc.
A frontend developer implements the new UI, working with a backend developer—among others—to make sure all of the information the new feature requires is available.
With the Play Valet, all of these roles are fulfilled by one person, so these can’t all happen at once. Instead, these roles take turns.
And after a long season of building, building, building as those lower roles, it’s time to come up for air and go back to the top.
What’s changing?
We’re really happy with our Valet, but we need to spend some time organizing the app to be more intuitive now that it has so many new features.
Look at this screenshot from the current version of the Play Valet.
(This is the first thing you see after you sign in.)
Some of our most important features are now those furthest from this screen:
How do I invite my friends to Game Night? (Plan ➡️ Add ➡️ Invite by Email)
How do they vote on what to play? (Plan ➡️ tap the Game Night ➡️ Accept ➡️ Add Games)
How do I sync my collection from BGG? (Library ➡️ pull to refresh ➡️ Yes, replace from BGG)
Worse yet, unlocking invites is done from the 🍔 menu, whose button is wildly removed from the other three on this screen.
We want to walk a fine line between what is currently a design with a lot of character and trying to learn from how other apps—and their teams of designers—organize similar features.
In the mean time, if you haven’t had a chance yet, would you give the Play Valet a shot and tell us what you think? We read every piece of feedback y’all send us. Many of the smaller features we’ve added to The Play Valet came from you!
What about your games?
Throne is back! We’ll have more to say about it soon.
Project S.T.O.R.C.—now “Milkshake”—is still delayed by a need for COVID-safe, in-person testing, and is now scheduled for Q2 2022