BBC

Game's GEL 2.1

I took over the Game's GEL project and was tasked with helping deliver a common language across the entire suite of BBC games.

The problem

Games GEL had been established for a few years and has contributed to the continued success of the BBC's games.

My team was responsible for evolving the patterns with the intention of giving even clearer guidance and further reducing any waste. This enables experiences that are beautifully simple across a range of devices and platforms, whilst also ensuring games are accessible to users with additional needs.

Games GEL pause screen.

THE TEAM

Robin Gibson (Snr Designer)
Ryan Hope (Mid Designer)

MY ROLE

This was an ongoing BBC project. I lead and defined the current version.

Team lead

UX Design

Visual Design

Stakeholder management

Workshop facilitation

Strategy

TIMELINE

August 2015

September 2016

LINKS

BBC GEL - Creating a framework for BBC games

Our Approach

By analysing how Games are interacted with during a wide range of user research sessions, we were able to optimise the flows of the interaction of Game's GEL whilst simplifying the User Interface.

The ethos of the Games GEL UI is that it should take a back seat to the content but be readily at hand should a user need it.

Myself and Ryan undertook a lot of research to identify areas for optimisation but a big part of this project was delivering something the games agencies could work easily with. They needed clear guidance on our accessibility requirements alongside our UI guidance.

Our intention wasn't to constrain creativity rather enable it by getting agencies to focus on the core of the gameplay rather than the settings screens

We created a suite of documents to give agencies the best chance of success including a Games evaluation tool kit that linked to the Design principles which I'd developed with the team.

It was a huge undertaking in retrospect, the documentation we defined would affect every 3rd party agency. I think they appreciated our attempts to remove the woolliness of previous iterations especially in regards to "Dos" and "Don'ts" accessibility wise which was not without its challenges.

We built on some previous documents and created an easy to use evaluation framework for judging the quality of the games from agencies

Games GEL continues to evolve to ensure the team are as lean and effective as possible. This approach allows the content to be the focus enabling agencies to focus on making better games.

Peter Rabbit pause screen by Mobile Pie.

Games GEL formed a suite of documents that I re-versioned for agencies, removing any bloat and making them super concise.