HAMZAH HAMEED

Irvine Based Product Manager

Home: Welcome

ABOUT

My Background

Previously medical school bound, now pursuing my passion as a PM in games and media
Currently a computer science master's student at Georgia Tech learning technical skills that will assist with my career in product management.

Home: About Me

PROJECTS SNAPSHOT

HEARTHSTONE INTERFACE REVAMP

- Attempted to validate and solve a perceived issue in regards to the seemingly random location of the different game modes
- Conducted surveys, interviews, and evaluations of competitors to assist in need finding
- Wireframed alternative interface designs and completed one iteration of the design life cycle

In Detail Process

GAME DESIGN BLOG

Includes blog posts regarding:

- Tackling an unexplored champion design space in League of Legends

- Creating a Pokemon inspired Slay the Spire game

- Results of the studies for a RPG focus group

Game Design Blog Posts:

Home: Projects

HEARTHSTONE INTERFACE REDESIGN PROJECT

Inspiration for this redesign came from my struggle in teaching Hearthstone to a a new player and his experience when it came to finding his desired game mode.

NEED FINDING VIA SURVEY

I began the need finding process via survey and looked to gather information regarding most played game mode, how often users played each game mode, and experiences with the current Hearthstone interface. I then shared the survey with the following Hearthstone related subreddits:

/r/Hearthstone
/r/ArenaHS
/r/BobsTavern
/r/WildHearthstone
/r/CompetitiveHS

After the survey I ended with 2,394 results and then converted the data into a SQL database and began to look for insights.

I then graphed the data in Tableau in hopes of spotting outliers or unexpected trends.

DATA INVENTORY

After exploring the data for the more popular game modes visually, I found an outlier in interface usability: Arena players.
When it came to a difficulty rating of 4 in particular (1 being easy to use, 5 being difficult), Arena players voted for it 19% of the time as opposed to the 9.2% of the time for non-Arena players.
This discovery gave me enough reason to continue on with the redesign.

PROTOTYPING

After two brainstorming sessions and 18 different ideas, I settled on the idea of placing all the game modes under a "Play" tab for my first prototype.
Upon clicking on the giant "Play" button, the user is brought to a new screen with all the game modes.

Tableau%2520Picture%2520of%2520Most%2520Played%2520Game%2520Mode_edited_edited.jpg

EVALUATION OF THE PROTOTYPE

To assess this card prototype, I set out to do a qualitative evaluation via interviews.

I had three users navigate from the home screen to different game modes and documented this process and then interviewed them regarding their experience level with digital card games and their evaluations of the prototype.

While the sample size was small, I discovered that my prototype while technically solving the issue of ambiguity of which tab the desired game mode was under, failed to create an interface that was easier to use for novice users.

My card prototype had seemingly randomly located game modes on one screen and this led to users having to exert excessive effort to access their desired game mode and made it clear that this prototype required future iterations.

NEXT DESIGN ITERATION

For the next design iteration, I would need to revisit the need finding stage to discover more about what users expect when they are navigating through a game interface. A qualitative evaluation such as an interview would likely lead to the most informative results.

Future prototypes would likely look to use more of the menu space on the home screen and to group game modes in a fashion that is intuitive to users.