Some of you have asked what our process is for processing and considering the feedback that you send us through Reddit, Discord, support, surveys, and other means.
Player feedback is part of our broader design process, which we've been talking about and thinking about a lot lately as a team. If you know anything about our team, you know that we like to write. So we wrote a little bit about what design means to us and how we strive to use a good design process to bring more value to you through AI Dungeon and Heroes.
Today, I wanted to share a portion of that document with you. If any of you have thoughts or want to discuss design process, I’d welcome the conversation. I love to chat about design 😄
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Devin
VP of Experience, Latitude—matu—seaside_rancher
Overview
Our fundamental goal as a company and as a team is to provide value to our players and users. However, that goal assumes we know what is going to create value. The reality is that we very rarely know what solution, execution, or implementation is going to create the maximum impact and value for our players.
Fundamentally, design is the process we use to learn how to deliver the most value to our players. This is true across all dimensions of design, from UX to game design to narrative design to technology and infrastructure design.
Design is the process for discovering and validating the best solutions that generate the most value for our players.
Successful Design is Successful Learning
Strategic Exploration Helps Us Move Faster
Dimensions of Design Abstractions
Every design is an abstraction of reality. Abstraction is a useful tool because it allows faster iteration and learning. The more you abstract, the more you can reduce scope, cost profile, and time requirements for each iteration. However, abstractions can lead to false conclusions and inaccurate data.
Understanding the different dimensions of design abstractions can help us be smart in utilizing the right abstractions at the right points in the process, help us accurately analyze the results of our experiments, and move quickly and efficiently as a team to discover the best solutions for our users.
Fidelity
Time and Cost
Audience
Natural vs Tested use
Qualitative vs Quantitative
Attitude vs Behavioral
Feedback Channels
Fast learning requires rapid and high-quality feedback to quantify the success or failure of a particular design. Just like design abstractions, feedback channels have different properties with unique strengths and weaknesses that must be considered. As you analyze feedback, it’s critical to contextualize that feedback against the strengths and weaknesses the source provides to make sure you don’t derive false conclusions from feedback.
Let’s explore some of Latitude’s feedback channels.
Unsolicited User Feedback
Solicited User Feedback
Surveys
Usability Testing
Product Metrics
A/B Testing and Product Testing
It can be difficult to sort out and prioritize the insights that we gather from across all these different feedback channels. Players frequently wonder and question whether we hear and see their feedback, or why we're not acting on it. The answer is nuanced. Obviously, we care about their feedback and listen to it, and we try to incorporate it into a smart strategy that creates the most value for our player base. When building our roadmap or designing new features, it's important for us to gather feedback before, during, and after any design process. And as we do so, it's critical that we consider which sources are best suited for the types of questions that we're trying to answer.