Overview:

D&D creates a space for immersive storytelling and fantastical adventures. As part of a university project, I undertook the challenge of designing a user-centric application aimed at providing a dedicated social media platform for D&D enthusiasts to share and discuss their unique adventures.

How might we build a social media platform that caters to sharing the unique collaborative storying telling of D&D?

Key Features

Adventure Documentation:
‍The app needed to comprehensively document D&D adventures, whether it involved creating a new character, detailing an epic combat encounter, or recounting the ongoing sagas of their campaigns.
Multimedia Integration:
Given the diverse nature of D&D storytelling, the app had to seamlessly accommodate both long-form text posts and multiple image uploads, ensuring that the narrative could be conveyed in a variety of engaging ways.
User Profiles:
Through research identifying that D&D players often engage in multiple characters across different campaigns, the app was designed with user profiles that allowed each user to curate a collection of characters and campaigns, each with its own sub-profile.
Campaign Management:
The app introduced the concept of campaigns as overarching storylines in which a group of characters participate. Users could also tag their posts with the Game Master (GM) responsible for steering the story.

User Research

Research was key in catering this application the its target audience. It aligned expectations and design requirements.  I compiled data around the D&D user base, via published statistics and then I ran a survey of a local D&D community paired with 4 semi-structured user interviews.

40
Million Fans
Demographic research, D&D has a major fanbase that has presents both size and diversity of users.
20
Survey Participants
Using a Survey to measure the user base in quantifiable measures. This was particularly useful in understanding scope and requirements for the prototype.
4
User interviews
Moving to long form interviews allowed for a more indepth conversation to happen. This gave me greater insight into the audience and let me ask follow up questions to their answers.
Do you play in any continuous storylines, if yes how many?
Measuring this gave me clear design goals to cater the application to.
How many characters do you have who have played in games?
I recognise my Data here likely skewed higher than the average due to the user base my survey was recruited from.
Do you use social media,
if so which ones?
Discord was the surprise option here. It was not originally included on the list however many users listed it in the other category.

Scenarios, Use cases & Task flows

Using research findings, I moved to design personas to represent the key audience types. From here I created Scenarios, uses cases and task flows too better understand the different requirements and steps that need to built.

User testing

Paper Prototyping
To test these flows against user expected actions, I started with paper prototypes. These allowed me to quickly adapt to user interactions without the need for more complex digital prototyping variables.

Tasks to test

1: sign up

2: Log in

3: Create post

4: Create campaign

5: Edit character

6: Scroll through feed

7: Comment on post

8: Check notifications

Refinement
Each stage of user testing provided more feedback that was implemented into the Final Design.

Design

Final Prototype and Branding