Milestone 01 / DM a GM
“Make it look pretty” became a product-design problem.
Mapping the existing screens exposed unresolved questions about matching, player/GM roles, and what happened after discovering a campaign.
The brief sounded straightforward: take the existing interface and make it look pretty. DM a GM already had backend work, skeletal screens, and a collection of features for connecting tabletop role-playing game players and Game Masters. Profiles, campaigns, messages, tags, swiping. There was enough there to look like a product waiting for a visual layer.
I started by trying to make a sitemap. I thought I was organising pages. But putting the screens next to each other made the gaps harder to ignore.
What was a player actually trying to do? Browse for something interesting? Find a game? Compare groups? Apply to join one? Those could sit close together in an interface, but they asked different things of it. Someone casually looking at a campaign and someone deciding whether to commit to a group needed more than the same screen with a different button.
The GM side raised its own questions. Publishing a campaign, finding players, reviewing applicants, and managing a group were connected responsibilities. How did the product support the movement between them? What happened after a player and GM matched? And where did a character belong: in someone’s profile, in an application, or in the campaign itself?
Roles & onboarding
7 screens
AI reconstructions of my early wireframes, preserving the original wording. View the original board.
The sitemap became a UX Brainstorm Dump. Each connection brought another decision into view. The screens showed that a feature existed, but they didn’t necessarily explain what it meant, who was responsible for it, or what happened next.
I also made a questionnaire to understand players’ and GMs’ experiences. It was never sent out. That matters: it records what I wanted to learn, not what participants told me. The questions were still open even as the design work continued.
This was where the scope changed for me. Making the interface coherent meant working through the product’s structure: the roles, the decisions, and the relationships between discovery, applications, and playing together. The early design work became a way to make those questions visible.
I hadn’t resolved the whole system. I had reached the point where I could no longer treat it as a visual-polish job. There were product decisions underneath the screens, and those needed attention too.