Co-Creative Director at Back2Wacraft
With the re-release of the fan favorite videogame from 2002, I was hired by the biggest english speaking commentary team based in Hamburg, Germany to re-invent the user experience on their twitch channel. By including subscribers in the design process we learned what was key to good streams within the nostalgic WC3 community.
After interviews and tests we learned that we needed to create more user interaction tools for the streaming crew while maintaining the retro-core feeling in the UI.
As responsible for the UX-development and the interaction-design process I managed a team of graphic designers and software developers. During the creative process I hosted and facilitated weekly workshops, design-critiques and monthly stakeholder meetings in order to ensure a common understanding of the creative process.
August 2019 - Jan 2021
Information Flow
Warcraft 3 is a fan favorite video game from Blizzard with a strong community that has been following the game for over 20 years. As fans ourselves we knew that there are a huge difference of game knowledge between the viewers in the community.
We interviewed varying audiences/subscribers in the community and decided to make make a classic top-down information flow with the absolute need-to-know information in the top and the nice-to-know details in the bottom of the screen to cater to both the new and experienced viewer.
Co-Creative Director at Back2Wacraft
Twitch/Back2Warcraft is a team of RTS (real time strategy) e-sports casters who casts professional Warcraft 3 tournaments. With their average live viewers of 2 thousand and total views of 43 Million they rank as the most popular English speaking casters within their community.
With an upcoming remake of an almost 20 year old video game, Back2Warcraft reached out to their community for a team of coders and graphic designers in order to create an updated platform for their e-sports casting. I got hired as a User Experience designer together with a team consisting of a graphics designer, two coders and a tournament developer. After a month of development in the team the CEO’s of Back2Warcraft decided to change my position from UX-developer to Co-Creative Director, as they felt they needed a manager and an organized plan for the creative development of the project.
During the project I managed the team where I was responsible for giving the them UX guidelines while reviewing their creative progress, while planning ahead. By combining my knowledge of the community and the game, the skills of the team and introducing them to the laws of User Experience design we created a complete overhaul to the old design which was very well received by their community. The design overhaul included new design + guidelines for future designs at back2wacraft.com, twitch, youtube, facebook and Instagram.
Recommendation
“Throughout 11 months, Andreas was part of the redesign of our Twitch Stream focused on competitive e-sports, during his work, he managed to combine the needs of a broadcaster with the creative spirit of our designers and coders while focusing on viewer experience. His expertise in UI paved the way for our decisions what information to display and how this information is best to be displayed for our audience.
On top of his professional contributions to the project, Andreas made sure that all members of the team knew their tasks and delivered their results before deadline and thus became an essential part of the project management as a whole, creating a professional yet warm and friendly working environment.”Jannes Tjarks (Co-owner of Back2Warcraft)