Magile
Bringing UX to the magical experiences of Pottermore.
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“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”
Albus Dumbledore
Designer – August 2015
Developing magical experiences
Energized Work (EW) embedded a team of developers with the Pottermore team, while design agency Studio Output worked on the website’s design. EW asked me to bridge the gap between the developers, Pottermore’s content team, and Studio Output. Jon Marshall joined me as they felt another UX designer was needed.
Energized Work wanted to balance the editorial and commercial needs of a magical Pottermore experience with their agile product development process, and do more user research and also a start using a few service design tools.
You knew it was all make believe but it meant so much to the fans and readers that it seemed real. I constantly amazed by the extent and impact on fans of the Harry Potter universe. It was one of those rare projects where creative possibilities often exceeded what we could deliver. I still remember the days we spent classifying Patronus for Active Studio to make an immersive 3d Patronus quiz.
It was also the only place where I had to take a House sorting quiz as part of my HR assessment!
Case studies
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Magile Pottermore
prounounced : madʒʌɪl late Middle English: via French from Latin agilis, from agere ‘do’, and from Old French magique, from Latin magicus (adjective), late Latin magica (noun), from Greek magikē (tekhnē) ‘(art of) a magus’: magi were regarded as magicians.
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Service Design at Pottermore
Pottermore had an established set of personas for their users, the challenge was to bring them to life for the management team. The easiest way was to combine personas with actual customer data, so we could work out where the pain points where for various tasks the users wanted to complete. At the time I was reading, […]
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Do-it-yourself usability testing
I wanted to improve the Pottermore website, in terms of its usability. With a very crowded publishing schedule, there was always something new to publish or promote, so there wasn’t a regular testing process. I asked some neighbours and friends if they would participate in some informal testing. I based my test around Steve Krug’s […]
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Pottermore Christmas present
Couldn’t resist wrapping some design books for my colleagues in a Harry Potter style. Had fun mixing a vintage royal mail stamp with Hogwarts. Owl post!
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Experiments in Pottermore chronology and taxonomy
When I was lucky enough to be working at Pottermore, there was a whole bunch of ‘fact checkers’ who knew the Harry Potter universe inside out, and when EW originally pitched to Pottermore Gus proposed and prototyped a ‘narrative engine’ for exploring the story. As a personal side project I thought it would be great to […]