Lord of the Rings: Rise to War
A structured usability evaluation across onboarding, UI, interaction, and game feel — turning play-test observations into a prioritized, actionable fix list for the team.
UX AUDIT# MOBILE
Type: UX Audit / Usability Evaluation
Date: June 2023
#Usability audit. #Onboarding. #Readability. #Interaction design. #Game feel
CONTEXT
Rise to War was live, but the team needed an outside, structured read on where the experience was losing players. My job was to evaluate the current UX end to end and turn what I found into concrete, prioritized recommendations the team could act on.
Rather than opinion-based feedback, I treated it as a proper evaluation: play the game far enough to hit real friction, benchmark it against strong competitors, then write up findings the way a usability report should read — issue, evidence, priority, suggestion.
01. Play the game and record the screen (2 days) — reached 6 Commanders, level 15–32, tile power 150
02. Observe issues and take notes as they happened, not from memory afterward
03. Play high-rated competitor games (1 day) to calibrate what "good" looks like in the same genre
04. Analyze and identify usability issues, and assign each a priority
05. Write the report (3 days) — organized into Onboarding, UI & Interaction, and Game Feel
Every finding below follows the same structure from the original report: what's happening, why it matters to the player, and what I recommended instead.
Onboarding
UI & Interaction
Game Feel
