Season 5 Design

Dave · 13 December 2021 12:23

As a part of my commitment to being a Design Guild champion, I hereby present a plan for Design work for the upcoming Winter season.

1. Create a visual “map” of the MetaOS we aim to build.
From this map, it should be easy for anyone with even just basic knowledge of MetaGame to understand:
A) what are the building blocks of the MetaOS, and how they fit together
B) how far we’ve come with our work on creating and improving these building blocks

2. Suggest a plan for the design work we shall do during the Winter season.

A) Aim to make progress with the following quests, if not complete them:

Landing page
Dashboard
MetaMenu
Search
Top 3 skills (MyMeta)
Seeds page
Updated Profile page (MyMeta) → dependant on Ceramic
Edit profile (MyMeta) → dependant on Ceramic
Contracting ability for profiles (MyMeta)
Role selection (MyMeta)

Note on progress tracking
Most of these quests have been started, whereas a few are in early phases or only being planned. In order to be able to better track progress, I will update the UX roadmap in Notion in time for the Winter season.

Ways of working
In this work, I and other designers intend to continue keeping designing “in the open”. This means we will maintain the practice of involving all interested and knowledgeable stakeholders for a given quest from the very start. The goals are to:

never have a classic “handover” between designers and builders
keep everyone up to date throughout the process and thus avoid any surprises
inform designs with as many useful insights from the get-go, in order to increase effectiveness and efficiency of the final solution

Output
…will vary, depending on which phase we’re in for designing a given solution. Early on, we are mostly working with gathering insights, then onto information architecture, followed by rapid wireframing and prototyping, then hi-fi mockups, etc.

B) Consolidate the Component Library

This has been a huge mess, unfortunately. Given the low capacity for doing design work—meaning mostly that I’ve been working all alone on the design end for the better part of the year so far—we had to prioritise making new designs before doing design systems work.

Current state
At the moment, our designs mostly do use shared styles and components, but those styles and components are spread over several Library files in Figma, and it is impossible to keep track of where everything is.

Desired state
Bring it all together into a single file, and continue using that one file—the single source of truth—for all design work in the future. Later on, we can also share this single file with builders in charge of the Storybook, so they can reference it for their own work.

Stretch goal
Ideally, designers will have found a good workflow for maintaining Storybook on their own.

C) Enable smoother onboarding for new designers

Inspired by the fantastic work @Misanth has done with revamping the onboarding paths in Notion, I intend to create a “Designer’s Path”, similar to the existing Builder’s Path.

D) Establish the optimal workflow for regular weekly syncing and reporting

In the spirit of avoiding working in silos, as well as being inclusive, we start reporting progress on Design work on the MetaGame Forum.

The idea is that calls cost time, can be hard to moderate, can be hard to arrange at a good time for anyone who would like to join, and generally don’t scale so well.
Calls are still irreplaceable for certain situations, however for reports it might be advantageous to use a communication method that puts minimal strain on participants. This way, we also avoid the need of keeping notes.

Please keep in mind that this plan might change as we move along. In case it does, I will do my best to document these changes and the decisions that led to them.

Happy to hear your thoughts and answer any questions!

HBesso31 · 16 December 2021 18:05

This is a big piece of work. I am glad you are championing it and that now you have some designers helping too. I’ll do my best to find you one more senior designer so you can advance faster.

Great way to have accountability.

Dave:

Ways of working
In this work, I and other designers intend to continue keeping designing “in the open”. This means we will maintain the practice of involving all interested and knowledgeable stakeholders for a given quest from the very start. The goals are to:

never have a classic “handover” between designers and builders

keep everyone up to date throughout the process and thus avoid any surprises

inform designs with as many useful insights from the get-go, in order to increase effectiveness and efficiency of the final solution

Output
…will vary, depending on which phase we’re in for designing a given solution. Early on, we are mostly working with gathering insights, then onto information architecture, followed by rapid wireframing and prototyping, then hi-fi mockups, etc.

One nice thing to keep everyone updated would be to give your achievements and roadblocks to the MetaNews team so more ppl can get to know it. I see every inch of progress as an opportunity to shill MG.
@P_V_F, @b0gie, @_Anna, and others.

I think this alone would be an awesome achievement xD

This will facilitate Headhunting! Pls consider tagging me when you have it done. I’d praise you.

And in your previously pointed Roadmap.

Great job with this Commitment Plan. Do you need anything to ensure it is done? What are the potential threats to fulfilling this commitment?

peth · 4 January 2022 11:31

Love it!
I was gonna suggest you create a Designers path of playflow, but looks like you thought of everything!

Now the only thing I’d suggest is squeezing in Quests in there if at all possible. Maybe impossible for you to do it personally but it would be great to at least keep it in mind when onboarding new designers
As you might remember, there was some progress done on it a looong time ago but now the Quests module finally has a champion again (@vid) so the design will need to get revisited & finished or at least a tiny bit improved so that fonts & boxes are aligned.

Other than that, I’d say the Seed page is super important & might be worth prioritizing over some of the other stuff you have on there - at least the minimum viable version, which shouldn’t be hard to build (short term just want all the info & links in one place)

Overall, looks great!
Thank you

Dave · 4 January 2022 14:55

Thank you for your kind and thoughtful feedback

To add some more context, most of the quests listed have been worked on for some time, while only a few are completely new, waiting to be started.
Regardless, there is no shortage of work around here, so if you find someone who would be a good fit, you are welcome to introduce them to us

That’s a reasonable thought. I would like to keep this “overhead” work contained, so am a bit vary of adding yet another “reporting duty” to my plate. I already post regular weekly champion reports in Discord, as well as weekly reports here in the Forums. I’d say the information is already available and easily findable, would you agree? I might just ping them and make them aware of that.

And perhaps the biggest challenge of them all. But I’m not losing hope

You got it! Aiming to get to that ASAP.

Thanks and thanks for asking!

Ensuring this gets done will be hard, because of how MetaGame works. For now, I am happy if this is easy to understand for anyone You know the saying “Plans are worthless, planning is everything”. The idea is to clarify the goals, and do regular check-ins, to see if we’re making progress and staying on-course.
The biggest potential threat is that there isn’t enough people to do it Another one is the technology we are relying on (e.g. Ceramic) which can itself be in very early stages, and thus not ready for broader use. But if I could ask for one thing, it would be good health for us and our respective families, because all other challenges seem small in comparison

Dave · 4 January 2022 14:59

Thanks for the feedback!

Re: Quests → of course, I’m good for that.
Re: Seed page → again, count me in!