OMEN Command Center

Challenge

OMEN Command Center is a software utility for gamers to maximize their hardware capabilities on their gaming PC and also improve gameplay. On HP's gaming keyboards, there are macro keys, an additional set of 6 programmable keys, for gamers to record keystrokes or sequences. Our users could not easily record sequences in the current experience and our team was tasked to redesign the holistic experience.

My Role

Lead UX/UI Designer

Understand, Unpack, Uncover

Firstly, we started with understanding why users even need this feature and going through a teardown of the existing Macro Key experience. Macro Keys was a way users could record a long spell or action move into one single key, so that in gameplay they would just have to click one key. We also discovered that this value proposition was not just restricted to gaming but also for email salutations/signatures, or even for those who worked in excel. Early user feedback has highlighted that our value proposition resonated more with gamers but not limited to that persona.

"Macro Keys helps save a lot of time and clicks when I'm gaming" is a statement we heard in early testing.

As a team, we believe that brainstorming and writing out the key user scenarios is always helpful to understanding out customer journey. This also helps verbalize the flows so that when presenting to stakeholders we're able to not let our WIP designs takeaway from the main focus and experience we're targeting.

Sketching and wireframing is the most accurate way to validate our assumptions and understand how real users interact with Macro Key creation. Over a couple weeks, we came out with an initial user flow and tested it with gamers. With a visual of the keyboard and which programmable 'p' key you recorded your sequence in, users could visually see which 'p' key there were recording. This also combined the need to assign and record on separate screens, which we later decided to put into one screen.

Feedback suggested that more people create a recording after having selected which 'p' key, so based on this learning, we made sure to design for this need.

We did quick clickable prototypes to test the flow and we found many people wanted two things

1. to edit a Macro recording after the fact

2. to see all the Macro recordings they've created

We added a column on the right hand side that shows all your created Macros and an edit feature so that users can edit an existing recording.

One of the things I love most about testing is that you get a really clear sense of what you're doing right and what you need to improve on. We didn't put many directions or text on the page, because we wanted to keep it stylistically minimal and straightforward, but much of the feedback we received was that it was "too simple" and"not enough text or description". We added a quick line of text to help users get started and that made the entire experience much more intuitive. It's not about changing a lot or starting over, but it will always be an iterative approach and we need to always keep unpacking and uncovering user needs.

Visual Challenges: How to represent real time recordings?

In the actual macro creation process, the user needs to see in real-time the actual recording including the delays in between each keystroke. This was a challenge for me as we were progressing, because we needed to find a way to intuitively show our users what they were recording. We tried several styles where the recording would be vertical, we would use color, or we would do a horizontal style. We tested these significantly to understand what type of visual would be the most easily digestible. It was not just about the aesthetics but about how our users reacted and interpreted each style.

This is about to ship on our gaming platforms by the end of summer. See our finished product here. Hope you enjoy!