Big Sea Games
Big Sea Games
Overview
In 2008, Big Fish combined their online Game Community portal (formerly Atlantis) and Azur, a 2006 initiative to create a casual MMO set on a 1920s cruise ship. These teams combined to build a new portal called Big Sea Games, as a way to provide high quality games and experiences to attract and retain social casual gamers.
Results
Big Sea Games launched August 18th, 2009 and reached over 831,000 visitors with over 4.3 million page views in the first week alone. The average time spent on the site nearly doubled from Atlantis, going from 4:39 to 8:39. After the launch, social networking features and chat were being designed but there were many developmental challenges of building out social features from scratch with limited resources. The decision was made to transition Big Sea Games to Facebook, which had already built robust social networking and chat functionality, and Big Sea Games transformed into Treasure Quest.
Roles
User Experience, User Interface, Prototyping, Visual Design, Production
I created wireframes for every aspect of the site to ensure a solid foundation on which to begin building the site.
Later, I linked wireframes together and generated user flows to visualize the user experience of navigating through the site.
Paper prototypes were created and used frequently in user testing sessions, which allowed me to quickly iterate screens based on user feedback.
I also created more advanced wireframe prototypes to test out different interaction design concepts with customers.
The site went through a series of brand and visual design iterations. The overall design was updated to incorporate user experience improvements gathered from testing sessions.
