FICTIONEERS

Product Designer | SaaS

The Fictioneers platform powered the Wallace and Gromit ‘The Big Fix Up’ app, allowing Ardman and Fictioneers to create an interactive, real-time story playable across devices and the real world.

Believing the software could support other creators, the Fictioneers team brought me in to design an inspiring, user-friendly platform. As well as prototyping new applications for the platform's capabilities.

Problem

The platform needed to be reimaged as a creator tool, useable by anyone with a narrative that wanted to merge real life and digital and augmented experiences.

I spoke to Experience Designers at Universal Studios, Narrative Designers within agencies at AKQA, and Game Designers at AAA studios, in order to gain their knowledge on what makes a great experience. From the interviews, I mapped workflows and pain points which helped me identify areas for improvement and missing features within the Fictioneers platform.

Solution

I identified four key narrative structures that would deliver the most value to clients and collaborated with engineers to embed these into platform logic.

These structures enabling clients to craft experiences previously unattainable, including:

  • Locked and unlocked content support

  • Reward and currency systems

  • Personalized, user-specific journeys

  • User-choice options

Delivery

I designed the UI and backend logic to support new narrative-building elements and developed a simulator to visualize and refine experiences during creation.

In collaboration with creators at AKQA, we leveraged these tools and structures to craft a new campaign experience for their client, Coca-Cola.

The process