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*User Journey Mapping - Creating a Player - Levels - 03-28-2021
User Journey Mapping - Creating a Player
Hey everyone, I’m Levels and I’m new here. I wrote this article about user journey mapping since I use XD approaches all the time at work and well, the player creation process could use some updating. This might come across as negative, but it’s only negative cause I cared enough to write it. Hope it helps someone consider how this is designed (and could be improved).
Yeah. This is a user journey map to hopefully consider some user experience in how you design the create a player section, process and touchpoint. Because, there’s a million tabs in my browser and it’s not 2010. I don’t know if this counts as media, but for this rookie point task (one tab of many open at the moment) I need media so fingers crossed.
What’s a user journey map? It’s this really awesome design tool that helps you design services / products / applications based on actual user experience. You know, making things work like people want them to work so they stick around and enjoy the experience overall - recommend it to others, use it more frequently, or do whatever is the goal.
It’s used everywhere today. I’m sure many of you have used one in your work or school or seen it mentioned somewhere. And so, here’s one for you sim football fanatics to consider.
Wait you might be thinking, isn’t user research really important before making a map? Yes, but so is iteration - so consider this an MVP. I hope others add their views and comments so the journey can be iterated upon.
The parts of a user journey map:
- Defining the scope
- Creating a user persona
- Defining the scenario and expectations
- Listing touchpoints and stages
- User intentions, actions, motivations
- Journey sketching
- Emotional state mapping
- Validations and refining
1. Defining the scope
This is going to be a detailed user journey map right onto the sole process of creating a player. We’re not going to go high-level and consider the rest of the user experience on the site/game/forums/discord. Right now, all we care about is creating a player.
2. Creating a user persona
Well, I mean I really don’t want to pidgeon-hole anyone here. So let’s start with some safe assumptions: a user on this site is someone who spends some free time online. Otherwise they’d have struggled to find the site. Now, they also presumably know football - or at least have some interest in football, although honestly that should be validated since you never know.
What else? We can make generalizations about age, gender, etc. but that’s not that helpful since it doesn’t really help define the journey. But we can probably include that users who sign up want to play - or they enjoy the idea of building a player who can play inside a simulation football site.
Most likely they saw a reddit post and either clicked through or saved it for later (like me). The alternative entry is probably referrals? Considering that there was a whole “Referred by:” prompt.
So what’s our persona? Someone comfortable with the modern internet. Someone with free time to browse and at least consider opting into a simulation football game. Someone with base knowledge or interest in the sport (or sports in general).
These wrong? Great - that’s what validation is for.
3. Define the scenario and user expectations
So let’s paint the picture. Our User, called User, has seen a reddit advertisement or saved that advertisement after seeing it. They read it, they think, that’s pretty cool, I should check that out.
AND, before we go, what is User’s expectation? Well they want to create a player for this new forum. And, presumably, they want to start their player’s career. Easy right?
4. Touchpoints and Stages
Let’s work through it. For reference, a touchpoint is a user action or interaction with the product (being the process of creating a player). A channel is how they accomplish the action.
So, the user wants to create a player. What are the touchpoints:
Well, they need to register for the forum.
They need to register or load the discord servers.
They need to create a thread in the Create a Player forum with their details.
At the end of the day, those are the touchpoints in the process of creating a player. Each one has only one channel (the forums, Discord, the forums).
However, we can break the whole process into stages for smaller reference points:
Registration: here the User comes to the site, registers, and prepares for their player journey, exploring and with the expectation the process will be simple and straightforward.
Initialize: next, they start the process. They find the Rookie Guide (or that tab), they start a new thread in Create a Player, and the process begins.
Decisions: decisions start to flow, reaching a high-water mark for the experience. It’s why people signed up — who do you want to be in this simulation league? What position? What type of player? These are the decisions I’d guess most users are interested in.
Research: well, decisions don’t just happen and soon a User will be swamped trying to understand what to create. What position is in need? What does this archetype mean? What does that attribute mean? They might finally make a decision, but it leads quickly to…
Attributes: now that you’ve decided a position and archetype, you need to determine the starting attributes. This is an inherently exciting process, made worse by the fact that all the tools for this are on different pages (though admittedly linked from the Rookie Guide).
Creation: finally posing! And then… silence. Until it’s approved, there’s no note about what’s really happening next. There’s rookie point task, there’s making money, and all of that, but for my actual player - where are they? They’re in some dimension of unknown - and I don’t know what’s next for them until there’s a reply to the topic. Excitement meets impatience here.
5. User Intentions, Actions and Motivations
Well the User’s intention is to create a player. But there is a slightly more in-depth lens to it than that. The User wants to create a good player, a star player, or at least a functional player. And when we’re dealing with the ego of an online community, that can mean not making a mistake. So good processes are simple and clean.
All of this journey takes place on the forums, since that is where most of the channels are located to create a player. The Discord is helpful, but clearly exists to answer questions and point people in the right direction - not to be where the actions are actually taken.
So let’s get into user actions for this journey.
How to know a process is simple and clean? Let’s look at the actions for a user.
First, the user needs to decide what to do. There’s confusion right off the start. The reddit advertisement I saw had four different links. There was a general discord link first, there was a link to the site, there was a link to the rookie guide on the site, and there was a link to the rookie discord server.
Well terrific, you say, that’s all they need.
User, wondering what to do, clicks all four into four different tabs, that soon collapses to 3 as he closes one of the Discord tabs. Looking through the tabs, the clearest one is the rookie guide - thanks to some bright colours and clear welcome language.
Once again, User is encouraged to sign up for the Discord, which he’s done and where he’s now responding to this very welcoming community.
But now, refocused, User continues to read the Rookie Guide.
It takes 2 posts (after a useful welcoming and introduction to the league post that reaffirms his understanding from the Reddit ad) before he comes to some clear instructions on how to actually create a player.
And the descent to tab madness begins.
User, following instructions, opens a new tab to the forum site and navigates to the Create a Player section and creates a new thread there. User then switches back to the Rookie Guide for the next step.
The next step instructs him to choose an archetype, and there’s a link, that’s great! There’s actually two links, but User figures he can figure it out himself. User clicks, opens another tab and looks through the options. Hmm, it’s there’s actually a few, and he’s second-guessing what he wants to play. User goes back to the Rookie Guide tab (one of 5 at the moment).
There’s that click and another tab, and it takes him to what appears to be a real-time dashboard of players in the league. Needless to say, it probably helps narrow down the position he might want to play.
A click back to the player profiles he can select, and it’s scanning time. Except there’s one issue … there’s different attributes on these. Some are pretty explanatory, but what does Agility mean for a Safety? How does Intelligence come into play? Questions pile up.
User jumps back to the Rookie Guide, and scrolls down. Scrolls, scrolls, scanning, scanning. If they are lucky, they catch 2nd in the list a link to Attributes and What They Do. If they’re unlikely, it’s a desperate search, most likely resolved by a friendly discord face.
And so, yet another tab opens up (now we’re at 7). A list of attributes, how useful. They’re well explained and clear. That was helpful, User thinks, as they look through the tabs for the archetypes again. Finally they’ve settled on a build.
They follow instructions, copying the top part of the build over to the empty player page User started (6 steps back). And User sighs, finally getting back to the Rookie Guide to get to the next step.
The third step, User finds out, is to apply their 50 TPE to their build. Okay - that needs to be unpacked a bit for new users, but the guide does a decent job. There’s some mental maths involved, but a scan of the guide shows a handy link to a Player Builder Form. Hurrah!
Click. Tab. (At 8 for those counting at home). This form is very helpful and useful, making it pretty clear that you have 50 to spend, you select the archetype you chose, you spend your points. And then, User realizes he’s got to track the changes. Taking a mental note, User goes back to your player page and updates the attributes.
Success? A click back to the Rookie Guide gives the a-ok to post. So User posts.
And the process ends. It’s a little anticlimactic, but there’s the Discord, and a site trove of details and questions they have, so User can be preoccupied.
Let’s recap the actions:
- Initial Ad - clicks the links, introduction.
- Discord Servers - gets involved, acts as support mechanism.
- Rookie Guide - reads and takes first steps.
- Create a Player New Thread for User’s Player - returns multiple times to this page.
- Archetypes - returns multiple times to this page, key decision making.
- Player Tracker - contextual information.
- Attributes and What They Do - critical information.
- Player Builder Form - support mechanism.
Well, the process through decisions is actually pretty decent. It would be great to not create a new thread in a forum to create a player like its 1991, but it’s also made pretty easy by how well-written the Rookie Guide is.
The real problems start once you’re actually making a player. The contextual information, gathered into the Rookie Guide, is not actually gathered or concise or in one location. The Rookie Guide does a good job pointing out everything you should look at, but you still end up with 8+ tabs and counting by the time you’ve finished the process.
This is an unreasonable load on a new user, especially in today’s user-friendly applications and websites. I get this isn’t a dedicated website and just a community forum, but even changes to concisely incorporate all the information to the Rookie Guide would help with tab fatigue and information overload (and an ideal world we’d have a dedicated interface and web application for this).
6. User Journey Mapping and Emotional State Mapping
Courtesy of Figma:
![[Image: ygxm6w9.png]](https://i.imgur.com/ygxm6w9.png)
As you can see, emotional mapping starts out very high - the user is excited to come to the site, or interested enough from the advertisement they heard. They then drop, after realizing this is a forum environment (I’d potentially make that drop further). It raises again as we get into the meat of the experience: decisions on what to play and who to play as. Then it drops and never recovers as the tab fatigue, information overload, and complexity of navigating the forums hits the user.
7. Validation and refinement
And here we go. Seems like comments and replies to this is a great place to start with validation. If I’m the league, I have a dedicated UX person who focuses on this (and other processes) to find improvements, working with groups of people to gather input. Maybe that’s too much? But after my 3 days here it seems like there’s a league job for everything so this could probably be considered a priority (considering how integral it is to like user retention).
- Levels, think this is 2,235 words and my first article.
RE: User Journey Mapping - Creating a Player - SchwarzNarr - 03-28-2021
Hey! I love the feedback, and the complaint of how many tabs to start is one that I had myself. It's something we've weighed (number of tabs) compared to making the rookie guide have all of that information in one place (which can make it massive and can be incredibly intimidating to look at too). It's why we keep trying to include a variety of mediums (forum posts, one rookie guide, the discord for more personalized "hey can you walk me through this one on one", and videos). If you want to chat more about what you think we could do to streamline the process, or make it easy to find what you need while still not making it feel overwhelming, let's chat any time. Drop me a line here on the forums or on discord.
RE: User Journey Mapping - Creating a Player - Pib - 03-28-2021
Without question, the best media post I've read. Great work.
RE: User Journey Mapping - Creating a Player - Tomasnz - 03-29-2021
great post. definitely a great presentation of the process it takes to creat a player and insight offered into improvements.
i’ll be interested in what your thoughts are on the next few steps. i definitely think the barriers of learning are extremely steep for these types of sim leagues. but that once that is done it is a pretty painless journey.
RE: User Journey Mapping - Creating a Player - Raven - 03-29-2021
Very interesting article. Once you get as used to these types of leagues as I have over the last 6 years you kinda lose eye for what kind of challenges new users might bump into.
All in all a good read and a great discuission opener.
RE: User Journey Mapping - Creating a Player - Levels - 03-29-2021
Thanks all for the comments and feedback. Enjoy looking at processes and how they're mapped, but it is clear you've put a lot of thought in this - the Rookie Guide was well written and had all the links, it just involved a lot of work. And for sure, I'm guessing comfort comes with time - but an ideal user experience is friendly to new faces too (and pretty key to growing userbases).
RE: User Journey Mapping - Creating a Player - Pat - 03-29-2021
This post is insane. I love it! Please keep creating media like this!!
RE: *User Journey Mapping - Creating a Player - 37thchamber - 03-30-2021
As an aside, attribute descriptions are in the player builder.
Though I appreciate that this is probably not obvious. Particularly on mobile. I'll see if I can get a note added to make it clearer.
![[Image: yKloIHE.png]](https://i.imgur.com/yKloIHE.png)
My understanding is that there is work underway to address most if not all of the issues raised here, though. This is one of the things we were discussing in the dev server a while back, for sure... but I think dev processes have slowed due to various factors lately.
Good input though. Like Raven says, veterans have blind spots etc.
RE: *User Journey Mapping - Creating a Player - Levels - 03-30-2021
(03-30-2021, 04:16 AM)37thchamber Wrote: As an aside, attribute descriptions are in the player builder.
Though I appreciate that this is probably not obvious. Particularly on mobile. I'll see if I can get a note added to make it clearer.
My understanding is that there is work underway to address most if not all of the issues raised here, though. This is one of the things we were discussing in the dev server a while back, for sure... but I think dev processes have slowed due to various factors lately.
Good input though. Like Raven says, veterans have blind spots etc.
That's really great and helps move things into one location -- plus the player builder was very useful when making the player. I actually did know about the tooltips (it's how I learned about the attributes when making the player), but the concern with tooltips is (1) their hidden nature, and (related) (2) their accessibility.
Essentially, tooltips aren't very accessible if you're stuck using a mouse to discover them. When using the player builder, a non-mouse user wouldn't see any of the attribute definitions. A screenreader also doesn't catch them (lots of steppers, little explanations). I get that accessibility probably isn't front concern, but if isn't baked into development the technical debt can be hard to overcome later.
Exciting that a lot of this is captured with the dev team here. I hope user experience and user research is considered by the team, given the standards of a modern web user. Looking forward to whatever features are in the next sprint.