When Scholastic need someone to design a new website for the acclaimed Harry Potter book series, they turned to Popular Front. When Popular Front needed someone to lead a rapid UX concepting process, they turned to me.
Believe it or not the driving strategy for the new website was that it had to remind visitors that before all the movies, video games, and amusement parks, Harry Potter was a magical series of books. The new site needed to drive that book-centric view of the franchise home to a tween audience while encouraging them to engage with the brand through a series of polls, quizzes, interactive magical spells.
Popular Front’s goal was to present Scholastic with a wide variety of highly vetted experience concepts in a relatively short time frame. In order to accomplish that, we turned to a “sketchboarding” methodology that I had adapted from Adaptive Path’s Good Design Faster sketching workshops.
During the concepting sprint, I lead the sketching team through a rigorous process that included structured team sessions, individual work time, and regularly scheduled critiques with internal leadership. At the end of the sprint, the client selected my sketch/concept to go into production.
During production, I served as the Product Owner in Popular Front’s Agile development process while continuing the concepting process for 7 spells/games that constituted the bulk of the experience’s interactions.
The “spells” were intended to loosely mirror Harry’s journey through the books while steering clear of a long list of specific topics that had been or were to be developed as part of other properties. The spells can be played via the links below:
