The Commend System
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Through applying all of our research and insights, we developed the HiFi Concept Prototype in Figma located below
Link to Prototype

COD Warzone and Companion App

I began playing Call of Duty as a new user. I enjoy playing first person shooters and have had certain experiences with them. But COD was a whole different style. I have never had just realism in a game before. They tried really hard to make sure they invested as much resources into realistic scenarios as possible. I saw why many people become fans of the genre. But my experience with coordinating with other teammates was very minimal being as how many people didn't use mics.

I did however find myself really lost with all the overwhelming content that was being presented to me all at once. There were so many areas that required exploration to truly understand what was the hierarchy of it all. Learning the jargon was also a challenge for me, being as how it uses real world terms to categorize areas.

The COD Companion App also followed suit towards this same aspect of putting a lot of information in front of you. It seemed really busy, and could be a little much for first time users. Something to note is that it gave out so much information, but didn't allow you to make a lot of inputs. It focused mainly on showing you things rather than you manipulating.

We looked at other competitors to try and get a good feel for what they had present in their apps. Trying to find out common traits that could be the ingredients for a good app cocktail. One of the common findings was that a lot of them had something to share when it came to their friends.

They all had a theme that went well throughout the whole app. Giving you the impression of always knowing where you were upon turning on your phone.

Information was sectioned in areas that made sense, allowing a user to know what tab to check under if looking for that specific area.
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In-depth Competitive Analysis link
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The internet has a wealth of information, and due to our current circumstance it was the best option for us to gather intel on what people thought about Call of Duty and it's Companion App.

We were able to encounter a lot of information from forums, discussion boards, and gamer servers. Everything from how people enjoyed playing COD, to the bugs and functions they found useless. We saw a good opportunity to even ask a group of people about their playing experience. But that unfortunately did not bode well. There is a stigma in the world of gaming about players and their toxicity. So before I knew it, I was being verbally abused but players in the chat. After exiting that server, I decided to continue just looking from the outside of the window, in.
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Netography‍
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In order to get a better grasp on what we were dealing with, we had to talk to players personally and get their pain points on the subject matter. Through Emel, we obtained some very good insights that got me thinking as to why these functions are not that common in games. Whereas Sean pointed out something that was common in games, but for some reason still needed improvement.

We found that our interviewees had the best games when they had a good group to play with. In these situations the phrase came to mind, "It doesn't matter whether you win or lose, but how you play the game".

We took some time to think about the different ways to solve these issues. And finally came to a great concept to pitch to the stakeholder of Activision.

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We created a 3 minute video presentation to addressing the concerns our targets audiences currently have, as well as our concept on how this problem could be addressed.

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We had to pivot from our original change statement
"We want to change the way players engage with their friends in the companion app in order to facilitate cooperation and competition."

The system that we were attempting to create was upgraded version of the old "Wager Matches" that Call of Duty once had. But due to legal issues, it was a function that would not be feasible. But we were excited to find our new current statement.

Moving forward
We will be looking for good ways to try and incentivize players to want to rate each other. Currently there isn't a system in place to encourage this. We had also came across some restrictions mentioned from the Activision stakeholders.

Restrictions
Such things as not being to reward players with skins, and weapon blueprints. I felt it was a bit of a bummer due to those specific things being the most common way to encourage players to participate. They countered it however by letting us know that we could use stickers, cards, and double XP as an incentive.

But we feel like there could be something more that could be gained from this. We will need to get back to looking further into our interview recordings as well as facilitating more interviews as well as user testing.