Revivify

And just like that, Year in Review was unexpectedly resurrected that summer; somewhat to the dismay of my manager since she was volunteered to manage this project in partnership with the marketing team. It would normlly be fine, but due to complicated resourcing, tight timelines and already jam-packed schedule, she had a lot of politicking to get this done——basically, "borrowing from Peter to pay Paul."

So, I was "borrowed" out to the marketing team 😂

Objective

TBD

Iterations

To kick off the project, I was given a deck that they had presented to their leadership. And that was all I was given from the marketing team. On the design side, I was supposed to leverage what was existing in the Xbox Design System.

I immediately started gathering requirements directly from the presentation by extracting as many potential data points I could collect from the snippets of previous designs in the deck while I waited for the marketing team to supply me with specs regarding technical capabilities and actual data points 🙃

Only after I had done a couple iterations, the PM had something they could make the rounds with across several teams to be sure we had access to data. By the time we got to the finishing line, we pretty much cut more than half of what was initially sketched 😑

Ship It!

Miraculously we were able to ship the project, but not without pain or delays.

I did have to create those requirements to include supporting screens like a "zero" state for users with no data that doubled as Xbox's Year in Review, as well as supporting pages like the login landing page since I seem to be the only one to know what you need to make an full experience 🤨

And there was constant content changes on the marketing side 🫥

High and Low Data Support

The template had to be able to support high and low amounts of data while trying to maintain visual balance.

Responsive Layout

As per good design practice, the page must be responsive to work across desktop and mobile devices.

Share

This was more or less a v1. We had some issues getting enough time to set up this feature for all the key social media sites. We just ended up making a shareable custom generated graphic to post in their feed.

Outro

Lessons learned when you get burned. From this experience, my manager and I had determined that we didn't want to repeat history in the next Year in Review.

Lesson 1: Make PMs more accountable for their lack of planning. The designer——who was already not supposed to be working on this project——had to spend more time out of a different teams budget to complete this project.

Lesson 2: The project only moved forward because the designer assigned to this project happens to a) be self-sufficient, b) a Xbox gamer, c) experienced with building online campaigns, and d) came from a high performing team in Microsoft so is used to spinning on more than one dime.

Lesson 3: Since we didn't get requirements from the folks who generally give requirements, we make those requirements ourselves for next year using this one as the baseline to start from.

Lesson 4: Start the process early. 3 months early.

Not everything goes to plan 🤣 😂 😐 😭

Secret level unlocked: Year in Review 2024