Angled Whiteboards

Last Thursday saw the relatively quiet release of a bunch of new GameTap features (in addition to the weekly stable of new games). Thanks to tomorrow’s release of Tomb Raider: Anniversary, the volume is getting turned up a bit louder out in the world. The website is still considered beta, but know that we’re working overtime to get everything just right. In fact, there are a number of fun, exciting, and useful improvements that have yet to be seen. They’ll come. And we’ll be right here to tell you about them.

In the meantime, we thought it would be revealing to talk through some of the user scenarios we had in mind when we were designing the latest updates:

• Feel like playing some co-op Metal Slug on your lunch break at work? Find the game on the redesigned website, log in, and launch it in the new Lite Player. Head to the challenge lobby and find someone to play with — whether they’re in the Lite OR Deluxe Player.

• Dying to share your [bizarre?] love of every game that features some sort of thing eating some other sort of thing? Create a custom playlist (call it, oh I don’t know, “Fast Food Nation“) and publish it for all the world to see. Those who subscribe to your playlists will see any changes you make — so you can keep adding games as the GameTap catalog expands.

• Played a bit of Myst Online: Uru Live and suddenly have a hankering for some more highly-rated adventure games? Browse or search on adventure, limit your results to games that other users have rated 7 or 8 and up, and dive in.

• Don’t feel like driving to the store just to pick up the latest Tomb Raider? Download it the day it comes out (like tonight at 12:01 am!) and be the very first to play it, beat it, and brag about it in the official GameTap forums.

• Find yourself looking forward to Thursdays so you can watch GameTap News? Now you can get your game news fix on a daily basis via the full-on GameTap TV on the web.

• Finally, you Gold-level members should now have an easier time convincing your friends to join you in your GameTap adventures. Simply point them to the rotating suite of free games and let the crazy-strong selection be that first taste that hooks ‘em.

And one more time (in case you missed it the other eleven-teen times): BETA website. Unfinished. In-progress. Go easy on us, please!

Click the OK button, you dolt.

[Similarly, early testing forced us to change the “Game Genres” selection ring to “Game Types” after users repeatedly read it wrong. At one point a young girl asked why she would ever pick a game based on “gender”! While everyone quizzed knew what a genre was (when they heard it spoken), they had no idea how it was spelled and consequently couldn’t recognize it by sight.]

On the dotted line.

History of the Button (blog nerdvana for a designer) has a piece up about the play/pause button’s migration to non-a/v products.

It’s a great article — and also somewhat relevant given the need to study some of our newer Home posters:

Dinah and I are IN THE THICK of it over here, so we don’t have time to do up a full blow-by-blow 1.8 design path review. But we do have a couple of whiteboard photos.

Some whiteboard activity was wiped clean before it could be photographed — the Gotta-Getta-Game concepts that got erased were superfun (at one point, you’d have been hard pressed to say one particular drawing wasn’t a bus). But a lot of things in 1.8 ended up going pretty cleanly from whiteboard to implementation anyway.

The naked, somewhat informative download process in 1.7:

The revised, more informative download process in 1.8:

Some of the minor points we worked through on this:

• How can we use SIMPLE MATH to show more info about a download in progress?
• “Get Game” vs. “Download Game”
• “Abort” vs. “Stop” vs. “Pause”
• “Continue in Background” vs. “Download in Background”
• What color is the background download-dot juice now that we don’t just have a full yellow dot?

My Playlists initial sketch:

Minor design points (and other stuff you might notice):

• “Favorites” vs. “My Games” vs. “My Playlists”
• The revised web/pdf all-purpose icon
• A couple of ideas for iconifying this very blog
• Blurry and cropped out bits (like I said: IN THE THICK)
  

While the 1.8 release certainly added a number of features, super-attentive GameTap users might have noticed the disappearance of one as well. Starting with this last release, Instant Match has gone into hibernation. Based on usage patterns and just plain seeing it in action, we determined that the Instant Match implementation we’d launched with wasn’t working.

Now we have an opportunity to potentially improve the feature. So. What would you like to see? Without getting into too much detail and biasing your ideas: the initial idea behind Instant Match was to quickly and easily help people find someone (anyone, actually — and without having to directly challenge an indentified player) to play a particular Challenge! game with. Please give us your suggestions, and/or fill out the poll below.