Chenyang Huang
© Chenyang Huang

MYTHIC HEROES

PROJECT INTRO

image from Google Play

imgae from App Magic

What is Mythic Heroes ?



Mythic Heroes is a mobile RPG game. It's aimed at the mid-core mobile game market.

The development team at IGG Canada consists of approximately 100 people.


The project took about two years to complete. And it has been downloaded over 5 million times and has earned over $20 million in just two years.



What is my role as UX designer?


In 2018, I joined the design team at the start of this project, when the team was relatively small. As the UX/UI designer of this team, I have been through the entire preproduction, production, and online operation processes.



1. Planning: I plan the navigation system and set up some basic rules for UI development.


2. Address and solve Issues: Find the problems by analyzing the data collected from the server, player community or Interview players from different backgrounds. Come up with solutions for them.


3. Work Backward: It's a never-ending task for me to improve the user experience on all versions. Specifically, battle the increasing complexity of each update.



4. Designing: I was responsible for designing some of the most innovative systems. Brainstrom idead with teamates. Use sketches, documentation, wireframes, and prototyping to communicate with others.


5. Owener: To these systems I was responsible for, I am the one to ensure these the UI, animation, images, and implantation work properly.



Who is our player?

Mythic Heroes is targeting players around 35. It’s a casual, mid-core RPG game. They usually has a high income and little time. Casual games like Candy Crush and Coin Master take up most of the mobile game market in North America. However, there are very few mid-core games.


What's the catch for an UX designer？


1.The new player will spend little time understanding the game. I don't meant to make the game easy but to provide enough information for the player to understand the game.


2. Provide the players with as much convience as we can. Don't force the player do things repetitively, like collecting rewards , level up, equip and remove euipment.





PLAN AHEAD

The biggest challenge for this project is dealing with frequent revisions and updates.


This app contains a large number of pages and features. After the product was shipped, it kept getting updated every 2-4 weeks, which usually included one or two new features and a lot of revisions.


So, building and maintaining a set of navigation maps is very important to me. It helps me keep track of all the changes, as it is equally important to ensure everyone on the team is on the same page.


These maps help the UI development much more smoothly.


PROBLEM SOLVING



Problem: After the product shipped for two years, the complexity of the navigation system continued to grow. Adding a new icon, tab, or button to the main page becomes problematic.


The lagger issue is that frequent changes to the main page will affect users' behavior. They will feel unfamiliar and confused.



Solution: Inspired by the Adobe suites I used daily, I came up with a long-term solution to add "sidebars" to the main menu.


Result:

1, With this drop-down menu, those frequently used icons can be stored here. It gives the user some convenience without diving into the sub-menu.

2, We can always add new features here because this drop-down menu can be hidden. It will keep the main pages clean.

3, We can feature some popular items here, increasing exposure.


WIRE FRAME

This an example of wireframe I did for bounty Conract event. During real production, somtimes I can only do some rough skeches to show to developer. But I will try to show them as early as possible.

PROTOTYPING

I will do prototyping using Adobe XD or Fingama and ask as many people as possible. I will show my design to others as soon as possible. People working with me and people from other departments have very little experience with games. I will watch them play and see if they understand what I want them to do.

QA TEST SHEET

Once the systems is built, I will provide a QA test sheet for the QA team for debugging.

Description text underneath an image

USABILITY TESTING

( I can't show the company data due to the NOA)

The schedule is usually tight during game production. However, we will always run into trouble if we don’t test the design with at least 5 people on a mobile device. Here is some test we will do regularly.


Player Interview: Throughout the production, every 1-2 weeks, we will bring 5 people from outside the studio to test the product before its release. These people are carefully selected from different backgrounds, such as game preference, genders, countries, ages, and occupations.


After the test, we will watch them play and interview them after. We will try to ask more specific questions to test how much they understand the specific system, such as:


1. Do you know when the event will end?

2. Do you know if you can carry these event currencies to the next season or not?

3. Do you know where to get more gems?

4. What is the quickest way to switch a weapon from one character to another?


Data Analysis: The analyst will place checkpoints on each page to track the player's behavior. For example, how long the player spends on each page and which page or step they take before quitting the game. This information will help us address the issues. 

issues I frequently found by research:

1. text too small or too big

2. confusing display of icon, button, text

3. button too big or small or misplaced

4. not enough contrast on color or brightness

5. mistranslate of certain language

6. confusing system navigation

7. annoying red dots, animation, dialogue

8. icon without tooltips, buttons with error messages



TALK TO PLAYER

Thanks to the online operations team, we have a lot of ways to access the player community.


The best community I like to go to is Discord, which has a suggestion channel that allows players to criticize our game.


Although some players may talk aggressively, I will still see them as the core players of this game as they are taking the time to join a community and write feedback for us.



FAILURE EXAMPLE

As mentioned before, our player has very little patience. So, every decision we make should be based on this. Otherwise the plan will fail.


A small lesson: One day, our team decided to make a better hero summon animation to improve the player experience. The animator spent one month on this new animation, which is beautifully done, but longer than before.


As a result, the players all hate it. One player said, “IDLE GAMING IS FAST GAMING. " He is speaking the truth. Our players have no time or patience to appreciate animations. They want to get the heroes and get to the battle as soon as possible.


This is not a human-centered design process. We must exercise caution when attempting to replicate experiences from other games in our own. However, we are aiming at the wrong players, and it’s also due to a lack of "user research.”


these are player feed back collect from discord, mostly complain about the new animation