Stadia
Stadia was a cloud gaming service developed by Google. It allowed users to play high compute games on their existing devices via streaming, eliminating the need for a powerful and expensive gaming PC or console. Stadia was shut down on January 18 2023.
Stadia HQ
User journey map used to greenlight a new project with VP level leads
Visioning workshop I hosted to define strategic direction for debugging and profiling tools
Youtube video of a leaked copy of a Stadia Dev Node. I designed the out of box experience, setup, and interaction model
The impact of my work was key to driving developer satisfaction on Stadia and increasing the overall gameplay quality of titles released on Stadia.
I was responsible for ensuring that developers had a seamless and intuitive experience when building for, testing and deploying games to Stadia. I designed the developer dashboard (Stadia Partner Portal), API and library structure/wording (Stadia Command Line Interface), Developer documentation (Including samples, tutorials and API information), test device unboxing and installation (Dev Kits) and custom cloud native test tooling.
Strategy
I drove strategy through storytelling, creating a cohesive vision for cross-functional teams. This ensured that product planning across a variety of surfaces would ultimately contribute to a better overall experience.
Facilitation
I helped 60+ Software Engineers, 7+ Product Managers, and various other roles at scale through alignment and discovery workshops, cross-functional steering committees and processes for large projects.
Product design
I created design systems for Game Developer use cases, and defined interaction models for multi-device multi-location play testing on cloud services. I also onboarded and led Visual Designers, UX Writers, and UX Researchers.
Feature project
Test Hub
An endpoint agnostic, cloud native monitoring and control dashboard for game development and testing.
I started this project by auditing the developer play testing flow and found that testing games on player endpoints (such as Chromecast TV, Android mobile, etc) wasn’t the experience promised to Stadia partners. I found that the difficulty of testing and debugging on these endpoints led to game developers avoiding them altogether. I hypothesized that by making the experience as easy as using our simulated platform tools, developers would incorporate player platform testing as part of their daily routine, inherently improving the quality of the player experience. To do this, I came up with the product idea of ‘Test Hub’.
Play anywhere, collaborate everywhere.
By starting with the Stadia value proposition of “Play anywhere” I presented a vision that would tie disparate (and sometimes missing) experiences together under one unified user flow with Test Hub at it’s center. This included a complete overhaul to the package launch experience, allowing developers to seamlessly test any in-development project on any player endpoint, anywhere in the world. By connecting Test Hub as an analytics dashboard during these testing sessions, developers, QA, publishers and anyone involved in the game creation could collaborate not just on the end player experience, but on the underlying performance, optimization and compliance of their game.
Test Hub and the surrounding experiences were rated as the biggest user improvement to our developer platform since launch.
I successfully implemented flow improvements, system restructure, and effective communication that significantly contributed to the success of our developer and publisher users. My vision and continued product guidance were the driving force behind achieving the highest Developer Satisfaction score since launching Stadia. Leading this project from the early stages of concept through to release, I provided support to various project managers and many tens of engineers. This experience stands out as my greatest design achievement to date, and I am immensely proud of the hard work and dedication everyone involved put in.
If you’re interested, you can learn more about the details of play testing on Stadia, of which I had a pivotal role designing, here.