Drake: Parent/Child Feature

Updating how Wizards of the Coast creates card variations by modernizing workflows

Wizards of
the Coast

UX

Sept 2021 - Oct 2021

tl;dr
In this project, I not only saved the editing and game design teams 1000's of hours a year in menial tasking, I helped raise team morale within those teams as well. By providing low fidelity wireframes, UX guidance, and a shared empathy for their users to engineers, I removed bottlenecks and breaks downs in the Editing team's workflows when creating card variations for the game Magic the Gathering. I used UX best practices and user interviews to gain insight into the alternate card workflow and found ways to provide linking between each card resulting in the ability to push and pull data between parent and children cards.

Situation

The editing and game design teams of Wizards of the Coast's (Wizards) for Magic the Gathering (MTG) are tasked with creating and writing much of MTG's text that appears on every card. As MTG as grown, so have the offerings of types and variations of cards. Currently, one card has the possibility of having many different versions or alternate art cards that (in the past) shared no linkages or relational data in the system to know which cards were related to each other. Before this project, if one card had five alternative versions, all the data (25 fields) for the parent card would have to be copy and pasted individually to each alternative version. That meant that whenever one card changed... a user had to manually update every other card as well. MTG card sets range from 200-300 cards per set with a majority (60% to 80%) of those cards with alternative versions. This workflow resulted in copy and pasting 25 fields from 120-240 parent card to 360 to 1680 alternative cards just to start a set. It was then repeated numerous times as the set was worked on because there were no checks and balances to tell if one version was changed and other were not.

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Another consideration for this project was that any UI designs would have to be built from scratch for an old legacy system that will be sunset in near future. This final solution needed to be a light lift that did not keep the engineers too busy.

Task

Design workflows to push and pull data from a parent or child to other related cards and provide checks and balances functionality.

Actions

User Interviews

This project came as an ask for help from the editing team. I started by reading through all the documentation they provided on the situation and their current solution idea to create a list that showed all alternative cards cloned from a "parent" card. They said this would help them know which cards to copy and paste to during their work. I decided to interview a few people involved to understand the situation a bit more. During these interviews, I focused on goals. "What is the goal of this process?" "How does this work help move you closer to your goal?" "What slowing down or stopping you from completing your goal?" and dove in with follow up questions. When we had exhausted the process and goal questions I asked simply, "What is your perfect world scenario here?" and most answered with something along the lines of "build me a faster horse."

Afterwards, I met with engineers to impart what I had learned about the current situation and how it affected daily work lives. I learned that these people had been so over-tasked with small menial things such as copy and pasting up to 3,000 times a set and maintaining legacy knowledge of what cards were what that they couldn't imagine changing what they were doing. The editing team specifically had been missing deadlines and reactively building in large amounts of audit time to account for having to audit every card for accuracy, something that might taken a day or two was taking a week or longer.

Created Requirements

From the interviews I built a user story and a list of needs for the designs.

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User Story:

You are a user who needs to view a card

to see if it has a parent or any children

so that you can audit data and or push/pull data between them.

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List of needs

- Parent children can be in different releases or sets

- Add options when cloning cards

Clone as Child
clone all data
Clone mechanical data
Clone custom

- Add parent child to find menu

- Create doesn't match parent indicator

-Add to "actions" a mass apply for push to all children of a found set or component from set menu.

-Need a mass apply for push pull. eg all found records or on a component from set menu.

Low Fidelity Wireframes

Because of the quick nature of this project, the final handoff needed to be quick and easy to implement. After talking to the engineering team, I decided to keep the scope of this project small by delivery low fidelity wireframes to cut down on visual design time and UX guidelines to help direct the engineering team on how the wireframes and other additional needs should work together. I created the low fidelity wireframes in MIRO by using their prebuilt UI kit to save me from building all the UI components from scratch.

Results

This project has saved the editing and game design teams for Magic the Gathering by removing the need for 1000's of hours of menial tasking such as copying and pasting data and maintaining legacy knowledge of what card is associated with what. It created linking between parent cards and children cards allowing anyone to know which cards are connected. This feature also allows the user to push or pull data down from parent to children or up from child to parent with an added feature that alerts the user to miss matching information.

The real result though to this project was more metaphysical. The success of this project brought a large boost in morale. During a post deployment follow up, the editing team's producer said,

"... has also just been really big for morale because, getting the right tools to todo our job has been so good for this team. And in a way that originally they were told wasn't possible and then finding out, hey, we can do this. And hey, like, here's this giant, horrible, tedious task that you no longer have to do. It's been very good for the team."

The amount of time I was able to give back to these teams has given them the ability to get back to the work they love to do.