the DESign process

Production design

Here you can see a high-level design process you can apply for any product.

The design process splits into two phases "Discovery" and "Design".

• In the "Discovery" phase, the designer observes the player's behaviour/ approach to the issue to define actual needs. 
• In the "Design" phase, the designer creates ideas and validates/iterates them via user testing until an optimal/best design solution would be found.

There are many methodologies for user research and tools for design and validation. The combination of those depends on the nature and complexity of the product. Each game and feature should be approached individually.

UX Team

What if you have UX Designers or Researcher in your team or even an entire UX Team? Congratulations! You have a great chance to develop a unique, innovative and high-quality product and be sure it applies to the target audience and market.

UX Team will help you with:

• Increase revenue/ boost conversion
• Decrease outflow of players
• Reduce development costs
• Increase player satisfaction
• Reduce the risk of building the wrong thing

DESIGN deliverables

There are a lot of Design Deliverables, not all of them required for every project. Trust your UX designer to define the best methodologist and deliverables for your product. It is important to remember deliverables have to be delivered in a particular order, you can see in the picture below.  

iterative DESIGN

The iterative design process is equally essential for both new and live games. 

It makes the development journey shorter and smoother. It helps keep the team's focus on the product and entire experience rather than on individual deliverables.

How does it work?

• The whole development loop from the pitch till the release should be split into milestones. 
• Milestones should be meaningful not just from the business perspective but from the player's perspective as well.
• Every milestone is a validation point for entire gameplay and usability cases. It means it requires both field research and usability/accessibility tests.
• Very important to validate the design with real players. 
• It is critical to share an outcome with the rest of the development team to enable them to take the right actions and decisions.

From the Interaction Design Foundation

new game production pipeline

New game's production highly interactive process.  It requires a small, highly skilled team. 

Each pillar on the flowchart below has several sub pillars with specific design deliverables. 

Live game production pipeline

Live game's pipeline looks a bit more waterfowlish and simple, but sometimes it is much more complex due to many features that could be developed in parallel and have dependencies on each other.