The Halo Waypoint Challenge

My role: Creative Director

Note: in the nearly 5 years I've been with the Halo franchise I've had leadership roles on a number of long-term projects. Much of the work I've done is protected by confidentiality agreements, but I'm able to discuss my contribution to Halo Waypoint in detail.

Halo has grown into a diverse global franchise over the last decade, with many games and experiences existing in relative isolation even though they all tie directly to the Halo universe and fiction. Competition for fans is fierce among top titles: Halo battles for the hearts and wallets of our millions of fans between game releases with a number of other major game franchises.

The challenge is keeping fans attached to the franchise in the years between big title launches, and the proposed solution was ambitious: we'd create a pervasive, multi-platform branded destination to unify a universe of Halo experiences for fans, encourage cross-title game play and reward players for staying engaged with the franchise even in our off-release years. We also wanted to keep players rooted within the fictional universe in this experience so it needed to feel like an organic part of the Halo story, and presentation was critical: motion, sound, transitions and visual design on each platform needed to immerse players in the Halo universe.

The plan: create a cross-platform destination spanning the Xbox console, the web and mobile devices allowing fans to have their personalized Halo experience whenever and wherever they want it, serve-up daily high-value exclusive content and special prizes relating to gameplay, and make it deeply social.

Waypoint's launch was highly anticipated by millions of Halo fans and the games press. This overview video demonstrates just a few of our latest capabilities on Xbox, PC and mobile:

Halo was the first major franchise to attempt to create a long-term immersive network experience, and we spent considerable time learning from players about the content and features that would resonate the most with them. I used all of the data we collected from fans and through more formalized research studies, and created a set of experience pillars to guide the design of Waypoint features:

As I gathered more feedback from fans and the staff working on the project, I condensed the experience pillars down to our "poster pitch" -- these pillars guided the work I did with the team for not only the first version, but as I developed our 5-year roadmap:

One of the most challenging aspects of this project was the goal to ship feature-rich apps with tailored experiences on three screens: mobile, desktop/laptop and TV. Each screen not only has unique input mechanisms and interaction metaphors, but also unique feature requirements: what players want to do while sitting on the sofa with a controller is very different than what they tend to want to do while riding the bus and using a phone. We needed to plan a feature set for each screen that made sense for each device.

Waypoint launched with two major areas: The Intel section features daily content, including exclusive new fiction, videos and interviews, and the Career section offers a franchise-spanning player recognition system that provides challenges and rewards across multiple game titles and includes rich social features. The user flows and cross-device interactions were complex, so starting with a comprehensive flow map listing all actions and features on each platfrom was critical. Click the below detail of the flow map for a larger view into our early Xbox experience map (.pdf):

In addition to providing overall Creative Direction for the product, I took direct responsibility for designing the complex UX for career screens. The Halo Career monitors player progress across multiple game titles and aggregates huge volumes of disparate data into a personally meaningful journey through the franchise over time. Click on the image below for a detailed example of several console screen wireframes from a small section of the Waypoint Career (.pdf):

The up-front rigor we invested in planning and design paid-off with a nearly 100% comprehensibility rating in our User Research studies and a 90% positive user rating on xbox.com.

The Results

Halo Waypoint made a splash with both fans and press when it launched and within the first three months had logged millions of users, with populations continuing to grow steadly month-over-month in the two years since v1 shipped. Waypoint is now a thriving multi-screen network that's successfully keeping fans squarely focused on remaining with the franchise over years, and our innovative features are rapidly becoming viewed as requirements for major franchises that want to sustain fan interest and loyalty over time.

For our launch in 2009 I talked to G4 Television about the role of Waypoint in the franchise, read the transcript here.

I also did a series of feature walkthroughs leading up to our v1 launch, describing the first-of-its-kind game console experience.