FEATURE OVERVIEW
Personalized and engaging onboarding to lower the barrier of entry for new adventurers.
After launching the questionnaire from the home page spotlight, the user only needs to answer 3 short questions in order to filter content for their onboarding experience based on their previous knowledge and current interests relating to game mechanics.
The core game mechanics made easy to grasp.
Once the questionnaire is completed, the user is presented with their personal onboarding guide, containing 1 to 6 different content chunks, based on how they responded to the 3 questions. These can be done in order or at choosing and can either be read through or taken in through an interactive walk-through depending on how the user likes to learn.
Play through or read through.
Playing through the guided walk-through content allows players to experience more realistic interactions as they would happen in a real session of D&D, or, If you are more of the reading type, you can quickly read through the summary of each lesson on your own pace. Whichever option you choose, the overall content you're viewing or interacting with would be for the most part the same.
PROCESS OVERVIEW
Why is it needed?
Initial Observation: Adoption in popular media.
Ever since the initial publication of D&D in 1974, the game has maintained a niche following and a carried a 'nerdy' stigma, the combination of which resulted in a overall limited growth in player-base. In the last 10 years, D&D has received a substantial amount of attention from popular media and has been featured in many well known movies and TV shows. Throughout this time, 'nerd' culture has seemingly become embraced by more mainstream culture, in large part due to positive portrait in popular media as mentioned above. Thus this stigma no longer plays a significant part in limiting the approachability and popularity of Dungeons & Dragons, and has in fact, skyrocketed its popularity over the last 4-5 years.
Stranger Things
2016
Big Bang Theory
2013
Community
2011
Google Trends of 'Dungeons & Dragons', recorded as percentage of its peek value.
Observation #2: High barrier to entry for newcomers to roleplaying games.
The latest edition of Dungeons & Dragons (5th edition) has made great efforts to make the game more approachable to new D&D players, however, the beginners guide is still over 50 pages long. Even though most of the content in the guide isn't critical to be able to play your first session, someone who is seeking a relatively easy path to getting to play their first session will likely feel overwhelmed and walk away thinking the barrier of entry is much higher than it really is.
Perceived Learning Journey for Beginner.
Ideal Learning Journey for Beginner.
The Assumption
Newcomers to Dungeons & Dragons are more likely to learn the rules and mechanics of the game from a friend who is already experienced rather than engaging with the official reading material which may seem unapproachable.
The Opportunity
How might we harness the benefits of 'learning from a friend' in order to provide an easy and engaging on-boarding experience and help ease a new adventurer into the world of Dungeons & Dragons?
Confirming our assumptions
To confirm our initial assumption and seek further insights into the topic, I created a short survey targeted at experience D&D players which was focused on exploring how they first learned about the game and what steps they took to familiarize themselves with the mechanics and prepare for their first session. I used Google Surveys to create the survey itself and handle the responses, posting it to pages and boards dedicated to Dungeons & Dragons on platforms including Facebook, Reddit, Discord, and others. Within 24hrs we had received 310 responses and due to the initial time constraint of the project, the survey was taken offline to begin working through the responses.
53%
of responders learned about the core mechanics of Dungeons & Dragons from an experienced friend.
16%
of responders went to the official website to find out more about Dungeons & Dragons after hearing about it.
40%
of responders found the existing official resources to be complex for incoming players.
Understanding the user
User Interviews
The information we gleamed from our initial survey left us with a more directed list of questions to further explore the potential pain points and opportunities throught the onboarding process of D&D.
Empathy Maps
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Needs Statements
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User Journey
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Personas
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Design Process
The initial design
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The in-class redesign
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Personal re-design
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