PlayStation Parents Guide

The Problem to Solve

The Sony Playstation game store sorts games in several different ways, however, there is no way for parents to specifically search for games that are suitable for their children’s age. The closest rubric they have is the ESRB rating system which is woefully inadequate due to it’s broad rating ranges that are independent of age.

Goals

Create a low cost way of rating games. This was a pilot program and very few resources were being devoted to it at the outset so we could not have a team devoted to populating a database with game ratings.

Create wire frames and concepts for a new app with a rating feature, search, and store to test the “Parents Guide” concept before incorporating it into the PlayStation store.

Collect all design artifacts and notes into documentation for the engineering team.

Populating the Ratings

The solution was to leverage the experts: Parents. By identifying users most likely to be parents and then filtering them by different sets of games we could market a pilot program to users who already evaluated these games for their children. An interface was created that allowed parents to easily and quickly rate and sort games into their age appropriate categories. Since games could span multiple age ranges we felt that a “Yes/No/NA” selection would make the most sense. Ratings would then be shown in a bar graph on the games store page displaying the aggregate results.