Angled Whiteboards

You know those technical Emmys with the really long titles? We’ve been nominated for one! (talk about a complete thrill)

Specifically:
The nominees for Outstanding Innovation and Achievement in Advanced Media Technology for the Best Use of “On Demand” Technology Over the Public (open) Internet are:

• ABC.com Full Episode Streaming Player – Disney – ABC Television Group
• AOL Music’s Top 11 Countdown Show – AOL, LLC
• GameTap – GameTap, Turner Broadcasting
• Revver.com – Revver
• Stim TV – NPOWR
• Vongo – Starz

And the invitation is oh, so very cool. Heavy, dark brown, gold glittery card stock with slippery embossed gold print. Oooh…

See ya in Vegas, baby!

One of the many features launched with GameTap’s recent anniversary release is focused on further extending community in the client. GameTap launched online multiplayer games, chat lobbies, and IM back in July, and has continued to work on bringing players together — the inclusion of the new screen name popup is just one minor piece of the ever-expanding community puzzle.

Prior to this release, you could hover over players’ names (as long as they were signed up to be a challenger in a particular game) and see their high score before challenging them. This was great for the single use case of determining whether you wanted to challenge someone in a particular game. But what if you wanted to IM them and make sure they were ready for your steadily improving Galaga skills? What if you’d just played them and wanted to quickly add them to your buddy list for later? What if they weren’t actually playing the game you were (Galaga) and you wanted to meet up with them where they were (Street Fighter Alpha 3)?

The solution was fairly obvious: screen names should return more than just high scores; they should return a menu of options. And you shouldn’t be limited to screen names in challenge lobbies — your buddy list, leaderboards, everywhere you see a screen name should allow access to that gamer. So we hit the angled whiteboard and started sketching out some ideas:

Where we ended up is remarkably close to what we first sketched. Selecting a screen name anywhere in the GameTap client now returns a popup menu of contextual options:

You can IM, buddy/debuddy, block and even follow anyone (with the right privacy settings) around within GameTap. Within an online multiplayer game you can challenge, accept challenges, and see any screen name’s top score.

We think the screen name popup is just one of the many new features GameTap has introduced that will help HOOK PLAYERS UP. I’m always looking for new blood for my buddy list — especially since we also just added Buddy Leaderboards. But I’ll leave the design path for that one for another day. Must go play.

-or- Hey! What happened to my Local Storage tab?

Some GameTap users have wondered recently (via the suggestion box in My GameTap) what the * happened to the Local Storage tab in Account Settings. It’s a good question.

This summer, we enhanced Parental Controls mostly in preparation for delivering M rated games, but we also added a few user requested features. One was that parents be able to stop their kids from deleting cached games — so now, access to Advanced Storage is a Parental Control feature/option.

So, if you’re a subaccount and you don’t see a Local Storage tab in My GameTap, ask your primary account holder to turn it back on for you. Here’s how they do it:

1. Go to My GameTap and select “Account Settings” and then “Personal & Family Filters”
   
2. Select the appropriate subaccount name from the dropdown menu
   
3. Select “Edit Details” from the Additional Controls section on the right
   
4. Check the checkbox to allow access to Local Storage
   

And that’s it. The next time you log on, you’ll have full access to allocate disk space and to add and delete games from your cache.

We check the suggestion box regularly, so if you have a question or a suggestion about how the GameTap UI works, post it there, or send it to us here.

Angled Whiteboards is written by members of GameTap’s user experience design team. We’ll use this space to talk about the freedoms (and challenges) of designing for a downloadable client, lessons learned from other UX teams, and how to score a jillion points in Zoo Keeper.