About
Shinra Technologies, creators of games like Final Fantasy and Tomb Raider, wanted to release a beta product that users could subscribe to monthly and play unlimited games. The initial launch of this product was going to be held on a third party platform with a limited release. Shina only allowed a small controlled group of users to test out the product, they would then use the data they gathered to control weather or not they would move forward with the product and how much they were going to invest in the product
After the success of the first release we decided to re-do the site take it off of the third party provider so we can improve the UX and give it a much sleeker UI.
Shinra Gaming Cloud Beta
After Discovering the limitations of the third party hosting company, we planned the wireframe and sitemap to those specifications.
User Questionnaire
We designed a questionnaire that our select group of users could use to submit feedback, these users were already incentivized to fill out the form because they were part of the first users who were given access to the site
What We Learned
Some key take aways from our users were that they mostly enjoyed the community aspect of the site. They enjoyed displaying their achievements and meeting other players who shared the same interests as them. We saw potential opportunities to include ways for our users to connect with one another and communicate in ways that would bring them back into the product
Shinra 1.1
The redesign maintained many of the same features that were included in the first model but now had a 10.00 per month subscription that gave the user access to more features.
Rent. Buy. Subscribe.
we wanted to make this product available for visitors who were’nt sure if they wanted to subscribe, So we included an option to rent or buy the game.
Community
We wanted to design this platform to encourage users in the gaming community to communicate and share gaming secrets and info. One component of that were the community pages, which feature a blog and forum. Another part of the Gaming community that we wanted to include in the redesign were rich user profiles that displayed the players stats within the community, the list of recently played games including the score and progress, as well as the ability to add friends and message users. Users could also link to their Twitch Account (basically you tube for gaming).
Challenges
We also wanted to include challenges as part of the Shinra gaming community so that members could interact with each other and compete to win prizes and badges
User Profile & Account Settings
Of course we needed to give the user a way to edit their profiles. Much thought went into the privacy of users, especially considering the variety of different age groups of our users. All aspects of the user profiles were editable, if they didn’t want to display their progress or stats they could hide that information
