The Opportunity
At Disney, our small games production team was extremely busy supporting content updates for our live game, as well as actively developing two new prototype games. Our resource capacity was at max, and likely to triple if our new games were released. Improving our workflow by making it more efficient and automated would set us up for success.
The Solution
Develop a platform design system to create a more efficient unity development pipeline.
Developers may focus on creating tools for content creators rather than creating custom content for product updates. Designers may focus on automation for common elements and tasks rather than manual iteration for product updates. Business leaders may focus on creating great game experiences with efficient resources rather than firefighting resource management and paying to scale-up the team.
Role
UI/UX team lead and lead designer at Disney Consumer Products and Interactive Media.
The Process
Get buy-in
Educate stakeholders & content creators
Demonstrate how the upfront cost will benefit the business, and team, in the long-term
Discovery
Explore industry best practices for design systems
Research existing Unity store assets and comparison models
Partner with the development team for code solutions to support Sketch-to-Unity workflows and custom widgets
Collaborate with other Disney teams across the organization that could benefit from this custom Unity technology system
Resources & research
Invision – Design Systems Handbook
Invision – Your guide to design systems from the world’s leading brands
Unity Store: Doozy UI – Complete UI Management System
Git Hub – Sketch to Unity importer
Air bnb Design – Painting with Code
Design
Outline and document all design system requirements on a shared Confluence space
Prioritize and delegate tasks with UI/UX team and assign Jira tickets
Create the UX flows and UI designs for each component with whiteboards/sticky notes and the digitize using Sketch
Partner with the development team
Document and share designs with stakeholders
Test UX flows with production team in user sessions
Setting screen flows
mobile
Desktop
Unity UI kit system
Toolkit Components
A branded toolkit visual design system
Sketch templates and asset library
Unity project with templated components and library
A branded and organized confluence space
Implement & iterate
Prioritize and delegate tasks with UI/UX team and assign Jira tickets
Implement the designs and flows into Unity and partner with the development team to hook them up with code
Test UX flows with production team in user sessions
Go live with the Unity design system UI Kit in our production pipeline and assess any pain points
Add improvement tasks into a task backlog and continuously improve the system
Results
Our team enjoyed immediate workflow efficiencies as we added each toolkit component into our pipeline. We were able to sprinkle tasks into each sprint in order to avoid game production disruption. By doing this over a couple of months, we were able to complete our design tasks and hand over our work to the development team to hook up the code in our Unity project.
Lessons
Getting the time and buy-in to develop pipeline performance tools can be tricky, especially in a large organization like Disney. The upfront time required may seem daunting and the cost unconvincing against customer-facing product production.
To secure executive and product team buy-in, education, communication and collaboration at each project phase is key.
To maintain momentum in a fast-paced, maxed-out capacity environment, project management is vital. Being able to pull tasks from a well-organized Jira backlog makes it easy for producers and project managers to add our tasks into each sprint.
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