Role:

Senior Product Designer, Team Lead


Zack.ai - the gaming assistant


Year:

2018 – 2019




Client:

Dojo Madness


Zack.ai is an intelligent gaming assistant that enables the user to focus on what matters most - enjoy gaming! He collects various news about the users favorite games from around the web, decides on what matters most for the specific user based on his preferences and delivers it in easily digestible bits.

As one of his key features, Zack serves the users needs throughout the gaming cycle – from supplementing pre-game preparation with guides to in-game tips and strategies to post-game analysis with match statistics.

To satisfy the main goal of small and compact bits of news, a feed view with cards was the clear choice for both visual and informational architecture reasons.

In pursuit of a perpetually minimalistic and clear interface, constant iterations of both the card UI and the user interactions were necessary. Content became richer, interactive and more enjoyable to consume.

One of the factors that most greatly enabled us to constantly iterate and improve Zack’s UI & UX was the clear structure and a design system setup with the help of Atom Design.

Cleverly nested Sketch symbols, clear naming conventions and a design library as a visual representation of the atom design structure were our best friends.

A big goal from the very beginning was to really bring Zack to life and give him a distinct character so that the assistant experience would feel as real as possible—like a personal conversation whenever the user interacts with him.

This was the perfect place to integrate some well crafted micro animations even though they were mainly attached to a speech bubble in the early and fast paced stages of the product. The difference in the characters perception really felt like an upgrade.

You can see an early alpha version of the onboarding here.

request user input

input success

scanning / searching

general loading

Even the marketing efforts were constantly revamped on the basis of user feedback and various KPIs from our in-house analytics team.

The landing page as one of the best examples—it went from a minimalistic signup page in the alphaphase to a detailed description of the product USP and introduction to our platforms including desktop and mobile.

To develop even better coverage of all the 3 game phases, our current goal is to create a clearer separation between platform-specific use cases and generate more depth of information where needed.

We aim to achieve this by focussing on retrofitting the news feed with a setup that will maximize ease-of-use and fast consumption for a mobile on-the-go situation, while detailed strategies and game analysis get a more prominent role on a dedicated per-game dashboard.

To get a more detailed introduction to Zack, feel free to check out the introduction video below.

End of August 2019 the company management had decided to kill all B2C efforts including Zack (public announcement here) to focus on its B2B units.

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