OVERVIEW

In 2015, to support its popular mobile game store, Playphone had built a developer portal for its 5,000 registered game developers to submit and manage their games.

A few months after joining the product team at Playphone, I was brought in to make some experience enhancements. Working with our product team and a US- and overseas-based engineering team, we deployed a series of updates to improve the experience for developers

OUTCOME

I designed features that addressed developer and Playphone needs. These included adding functionality for adding/managing multiple companies & users for our large developers, adding a picker for developers to choose the countries they'd like their games to be available in, and more.

PROBLEMS WITH developer.playphone.com

No way to manage game release time
During the game submission process, developers had no control over when their games went live. If they wanted to go live at a certain time, they'd have to coordinate with Playphone. 

Inability to quickly choose game distribution locations
There were many cases where game developers only wanted their games available in certain countries or carriers, but weren't able to choose this easily .

Single user accounts only
Larger game developers often owned multiple subsidiary companies. There was no way to identify those relationships in the developer portal as everyone had independent accounts.

SOLUTIONS TO THE DEVELOPER PORTAL

Give developers control over game release time
The APK (Android application package) is the heart of every Android game and its release is a core part of the game submission flow. We saw that games were often released to the public with planned timeframes in mind (often based on marketing initiatives, legal requirements, and more). In line with this, there was a sustained increase in the number of cases where developers were requesting specified dates for releasing the APKs of their games.

To reduce friction, I designed the addition of a date and time selector for APK upload mechanism which added on a simple date and time selector for scheduling an APK release. This cut the process of APK release scheduling down from 4 steps to just 1.

Let developers pick where they want their games played
To give developers control of where they'd like their games to be playable, I designed a simple selection tool. We made the function available right on the general game information page, and developers would be able to choose exactly which markets they'd like their games active in. 

Let developer accounts have multiple users
Prioritizing what the most likely scenarios would be, I designed a section for user and role management. The mechanism was designed to be as simple as possible – an admin (or anyone with the authority to add users) just adds a user to their company account by name and email, and selects a role for them.