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I helped design a new digital platform for connected pinball machines around the world.

Client: Stern Pinball Industry: Arcades & Gaming Duration: November 2019 - March 2020; November 2021 Role: Product Designer Responsibilities: user research and defining core user stories; wireframing the achievements, dashboard, and profile management UIs; designing flows for scanning QR codes and registering pinball machines to the platform.

Background 📋

Stern Pinball, a true pioneer in the gaming industry has created fan-favorite pinball machines for decades. The company can trace its history back to game’s infancy when Sam Stern became part-owner and President of Williams Electronics in the 1930s. In 2019, Stern set out to connect players and usher in a new pinball experience, bringing the joy of their games into the modern age. We helped Stern concept, brand, design and build Insider Connected — the industry’s most extensive digital platform that connects players’ devices with pinball machines around the world.

Challenge

Stern Pinball wanted to modernize and extend the classic pinball experience into the digital realm, attracting a new generation of players while staying loyal to their brand fanbase. The business problem: expanding the community and the reach of the product; creating new revenue streams based on connected services.

“As designers we’re paid to envision the future but the user’s only frame of reference is the past.”

Stakeholder Insight

Solution

A one of a kind digital platform that uses seamless interactions between mobile devices and connected pinball machines to help players track in-game progress, engage with the player community, and participate in promotions, without sacrificing the classic feel of a pinball game.

Role

Product Designer

I worked closely with a Lead Product Designer. We paired on most aspects of the platform, though we did own separate features. I was responsible for:

• user research, ****defining core user stories;
• wireframing the game achievements, platform dashboard, and profile management UI;
• designing flows for scanning mobile QR codes and registering pinball machines to the platform. —— *The Team: ***Project Manager, Technical Project Manager, Product Designers (2), Art Director, Platform Engineer, UI Engineer

Insights & Learnings 💡

<aside> 💡 Here are some things I learned:

• User generated content can suffice as user research. You may not always have the time, budget or buy-in for user interviews and intercept surveys. But those methods aren’t the only way you can learn something useful from your users. I would encourage a review of support center forums, help desk logs, and other social network communities where real people are talking about how to get the most out of your product. Even new features for mature products need to be grounded in user goals and intent.
• Engagement doesn’t always mean time on screen. The Insider Connected platform works across multiple devices - specifically between mobile devices and connected pinball machines. But this connection is largely in service to the pinball machine, as it aims to extend that experience. Our sign-up flow was designed to get players into the platform and playing on the machine as soon as possible. In multi-device systems, make sure you have a clear understanding of the goal of the system, not just what can be done on a single device.
• Have a plan for offline edge cases. A reality of the pinball playing experience is that many machines are located in bars and arcades where cell service is unreliable. If a player can’t connect to the internet and thus can’t pull up their QR code to scan - that’s unacceptable. User research suggested players preferring analog methods so we added a way for players to print their QR code on paper. It’s not a perfect solution but it gets the job done. If offline support is crucial to your product experience, I would use research to find out what critical tasks users need to accomplish and work with developers to figure out easy wins first. </aside>

Process 🔄

Assessing Feature Parity

Stern’s vision was to innovate and evolve the pinball experience. They wanted Insider Connected to have experience parity with platforms like Xbox Live and Playstation Network. This meant features for connecting with other players, a rewards and achievements system, and organized competitions. We started by looking at what those platforms do well and what we could learn. At launch we knew Stern’s technology would put the platform lightyears ahead of the competition but we wanted to understand its true differentiators.

Process

Constraints