Summary

With so many cloud service providers already in the market, a new player would have to stand out and find a niche. Bonfire wants to target the gaming community and give them easy access to files from any console or location.

Problem

For gamers, in particular, there was no single service that allowed them to save from any platform. There are only proprietary services out there tied to the console maker. A way to access your files from anywhere on any console or PC.

Solution

The solution was to find a niche market that was underserved and had few players. While there were a lot of general cloud storage providers there were only 3 providers that targeted gamers and each was proprietary so you had to sign up for all three if you had all of the different consoles. I recommended we explore a service that would allow gamers using any device or console access to their saved games, screenshots, and personal files from anywhere.

I conducted a user survey and was pretty fortunate to get a large group of gamers to participate, overall we received surveys from a wide range of ages, an equal number of male and female users and all of those surveyed already used some kind of cloud service. There definitely seems to be a market for a gaming-focused cloud storage service. Based on the survey results there is an opportunity to fill a void for gamers in the current market. In order for the need to be met the service must be able to provide:

1) Usability across platforms
2) PC/Console use either through apps or plug-ins
3) Enhanced storage
4) Enhanced security
5) The ability to save non-traditional files like mods, DLC’s, models, and game vids

The survey also showed that we do not have to make the ability to collaborate and edit files with someone else as a priority for the product though, it would still be a nice feature to have.

The difficulty of breaking into this market is that the established players all have a large and dedicated user base that they market to. With favorite games that are not available on other platforms. The opportunity is that these players all offer cloud storage exclusive to their platform, every user, needs cloud storage, exclusive of the platform. A way to access saved games from any console or pc, anywhere.

A new company could make headway into the market with a tiered offering that includes a decent free option. None of the companies studied above include a free option just a trial option. With the right pricing structure, and larger storage capacity as you get into

the subscriptions and the ability to store more than just save games would make this a viable product.

If a way was developed to create plugins using API’s from the competition along With a targeted marketing campaign to gamers exclusively and highlighting what you can do using the new service compared to the limited capabilities of the competition, the new player would be able to grab a large number of users in a short time while the competition scrambles to restructure their offerings.

I focused on three personas for this project: A 16-year-old female High school student who is an avid gamer, a 20-year-old college student who plays regularly with his High school buds even while away at college, and a 25-year-old young professional that is

now a casual gamer but can still use the service for his freelance work. Some of the goals and motivations for these personas were ease of use, easy access to files and personalizing their online image.

Karl Bravo
Casual gamer

Motivations
Ease of use
Online sociability
Ability to tweak things

Frustrations
Losing files to a crash
Starting a level again
Ability to move files around

Laura Giles
Avid gamer

Motivations
Standing out as a female gamer
breaking gender barriers

Frustrations
Ads on my device
Game crashing
Slow downloads

Mark Dobbs
Casual gamer

Motivations
Ease of use
Easy access to files
Single service

Frustrations
Paying too much
Non-user friendly interface
Not enough storage

The results of the testing showed that the interface was intuitive and the icons I used made sense to the testers. I asked for follow up feedback from a couple of the testers and was able to get some good insight. One issue that popped up was that in my first design the dashboard defaulted to a folder level view and a few testers pointed out that

that would be an extra click. I revisited the dashboard and created a default that had a folder tree on the left-hand side and immediate access to the files inside the folder on the right.

When I started tackling the branding, I wanted to stay away from the obvious “cloud” references and started by discussing it with a group of gamers that could give a little more insight into how they think. The result was Bonfire. Many games have set points where you can save progress and refresh your character, one of those in a game called Dark Souls was the bonfire and it had a tagline that said “ Feel free to stop here and rest before journeying” so we tweaked it to read “ Feel free to save anywhere” for this brand. It immediately resonated with other gamers when we asked them for an opinion about

it. I started sketching ideas for the logo and locked in on a flame icon and built the logo around it. It is bold and clean and simple, something that could go for quite a few years and not look outdated and the icon was one that would stand out and be instantly identifiable on shirts or any merchandising.

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Going into this project the idea of doing another cloud storage service was daunting, what would you do to make it different? What audience would you target? The idea of a gamer-centric service seemed interesting and surprisingly our user survey showed that there was actually a demand for this type of service. A lot of valuable information was gathered around user needs and possible pricing.

The branding portion of the project went pretty smoothly with the collaboration of my survey participants I was able to develop a brand that was unique and easily identifiable.

The front end portion of the site was targeted more as a marketing tool while the dashboard was a little more intimidating. Initial designs were not intuitive and added

extra clicks to be able to accomplish some of the sharing options. After the flaw became clear in user testing a quick edit and the second round of testing showed that the new dashboard was how users wanted to see it and was intuitive.

The final product is functional and satisfies the aesthetic of the target audience. If I had more time I would do a more thorough study of the dashboard navigation and refine it to a simpler navigation and menu structure. The things I learned as the project progressed would help me earlier on in a new project by helping me craft some more precise questions in the discovery phase and would give me a more sophisticated view of how the dashboard could be laid out.