Exploding Kittens

Designing an ecommerce storefront for the funniest card game company on the planet.

The Client: Exploding Kittens

‍The Ask: New eCommerce storefront built from a Shopify Theme

The Budget: Tiny. (No wires, no research)

My Role: I led UX on this project

‍The Timeline: 3 months, UX had 2 weeks

‍The Team: UX, UI, PM, Dev, Project Manager

Exploding Kittens 🙀🧨

Ecommerce Storefront — 2022

💢 The Client

Exploding Kittens sells party games, and they're most famous for their first and titular game, Exploding Kittens, which is the best selling kickstarter of all time.

💢 The Client's Ask

They want us to build a site based on an existing template, and to use best practices.

💢 The Timeline

Very fast. Just three months for everything from client interview to shipping a live site.

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The Team

Lead Project Manager — Kevin Chung
Visual Design — Meg Fiechter, Carmela Ocampo
UX Design — Jack Rometty (Me), Mark Oxier (Oversight)
Product Owner — Shannon Fitzgibbons
Tech Director — Rob Thiessen
Dev — Jeff Ginsburg, Matt Meagher
QA — Jorge Ibanez, Sowjanya Gudapati, Jason Soliven

My Contributions

I led UX on this project, including creating new deliverable formats (seen below) to meet the tight deadline and creative restrictions of the project.

Client Questionnaire & Interview

We got up to speed on brand values, product catalog, market space, and more with a questionnaire and followup client interview. We use this to become experts in the brand, the product, and the market.

Three main titles drive almost all sales but they release 6-8 new games a year and are trying to make a fourth big selller. They need a way to highlight new games and also prominently display the big three.

"Exploding Kittens" is both the brand name and the name of a franchise and the name of the original game of said franchise. This confuses shoppers and is a challenge they want to see solved in the navigation.

A Super Speedy Project — Scrappy UXR

Exploding Kittens purchased the smallest agency offering — we pick a Shopify template, make tiny visual tweaks, and ship it. No time for wireframes or research. I chose the most cost effective research strategies available to me.

The budget is so small that our team didn't have any template or plan on how to deliver work. I had to make up a template on the go.

Paid research database — Baymard repository of some 2000 best practices will be used throughout the site.

Internal research database — Leverage their existing research insights, especially those in gift and game eCommerce.

Key Takeaways From Research & Onboarding

Because of budget reasons, Exploding Kittens is using our smallest brand offering. This means we pick a template, make tiny visual tweaks, and ship it. No time for wireframes. I chose the most cost effective research strategies available to me.

1. User confusion about brand name being a product name
"Exploding Kittens" is the name of too many different ideas, there needs to be clarity somehow that it is the brand name, a card game, and a franchise of games.

2. The budget is tiny
I can't even do wires. And we are using the Focal Shopify theme.

Game Plan: There are 3 UX deliverables for the project:
1. Navigation IA
2. Content Map
3. Product Cards, Filters & Sorting

Deliverable 1 of 3: Navigation Info Architecture

I created navigations using the unorthodox format of lofi FigJam wireframes. While showing the Shopify template next to it, this was enough to simulate hifi with significantly fewer hours.

1. User confusion about brand name being a product name
‍"Exploding Kittens" is the name of too many things, there needs to be clarity somehow that it is the brand name, a franchise of games, and a card game.

Deliverable 2 of 3: Content Map

I opted for a content map instead of site-wide wireframes. This was only possible because we have the specific Shopify sections.

2. The budget is tiny
I can't even do wires, and we are using the Focal Shopify theme

Deliverable 3 of 3: Product Cards, Filtering, Sort

To meet the lightning-fast deadline, I kept product cards, PLP filtering, and PLP sorting in Google sheets. This ended up being so efficient without costing impact that it's become our team-wide default method of delivering sorting and filtering.

1. User confusion about brand name being a product name
"Exploding Kittens" is the name of too many things, there needs to be clarity somehow that it is the brand name, a franchise of games, and a card game.

Bonus Deliverable: A Project Template For UX Team

My internal task while working on this project was to templatize the UX deliverables for tiny budget clients. My UX team now use this template to build theme builds and on these projects we've cut our required design hours almost in half.

2. The budget is tiny
I can't even do wires, and we are using the Focal Shopify theme

Recap: Key Research Takeaways, solved

Because of client budget restrictions, Exploding Kittens is using our smallest brand offering. This means we pick a template, make tiny visual tweaks, and ship it. No time for wireframes. I chose the most cost effective research strategies available to me.

1. Brand name confusion
I solved this with clean information architecture in the navigation. Brand, franchises, and specific games all have their own representation.

2. The budget is tiny
I overcame this with a scrappy attitude and expertise in Figma and Google Suite. This was an excellent lesson in client needs — clean, neatly presented solutions are what matters, regardless of the format of deliverables.

UX Is Done, Now What?

With wireframes complete, I moved on to play a support role for the rest of the project.

Supporting UI

I joined all UI team syncs and presentations, both internal and with the client. My role was to keep UI faithful to the interactions and intention of the wireframes, as well as handling client questions related to UX.

Supporting Development

Supporting Dev was as simple as providing basic interaction annotations through Figma comments — their requested method. I also remained a slack @ away for other questions that came up.

Celebrating Launch

After several months of hard work, we celebrated as a team. This is a necessary step, and belongs in every portfolio! We aren't robots, and it's nice to celebrate as a team.

Design Retro & Lessons Learned

This isn't necessarily part of the "project" per se, but it is part of my process and something you'll see if we end up working together. I take these notes during the project and review them with my oversight / manager afterwards to see what worked and what didn't.