Democratizing Game Publishing by Opening Xbox to All Creators

Microsoft Dev Center, Xbox

The Xbox Live Creators Program allows all developers to integrate Xbox Live into their games and release on Xbox home consoles, privileges previously reserved for managed partners with approved concepts. The project was comprised of three parts: a landing page with a narrative progression introducing Dev Center users to the program, a simplified Xbox Live configuration experience, and the player-facing store experience on console.

The landing page is chunked out into four areas:

• Get started. Enable XBL to dive right into configuring

• Value prop. What they’ll get out of the program

• Requirements. The process for getting started

• Upgrade. And a path to more functionality and exposure with ID@Xbox

The configuration experience is massively simplified compared to that of the Xbox Developer Portal. While boasting fewer features (and requirements and restrictions), those that remain follow a much simpler interaction pattern.

This is one of my first projects serving as lead, and the first to ship. I managed a contract interaction designer for the end-to-end experience, provided direction for an external production team creating assets, wrote the copy, and designed the console store landing page (my first consumer-facing project in years!). We also managed to set a record for “most productive relationship with marketing.”

On release, the program was met with praise, and thousands of hobbyist developers have published games.

UX: Arisa Conwell   PM: Greg Gonyea   Design Lead: Jon Anderson