The Big Word Game

2024 Q3
web app

Overview

Growing up playing The Big Word Game with my family on long road trips inspired me to recreate it as a web application. I've expanded the original idea of the game, which is to put forth a three-syllable word that starts with the target letter. At its core, The Big Word Game is a fun educational game for nearly all ages that helps to keep your brain active and your vocabulary expansive!

My Role

Branding

UI Design

UX Design

Copywriting

Development

Presence

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Backstory

Being at the start of my programming journey, I knew that I needed to build projects to grow my skills and knowledge.

The Big Word Game seemed like a perfect blend of something I was passionate about that had some kind of real-world potential. Because I played it as a child with my mother and sisters, I knew that it provided a fun and engaging bonding experience for all ages. So, I've positioned the game as great for testing & building children's vocabulary and great for retaining the mental acuity of older folk.

Visual Design

My app fell into a few distinct categories which drove my visual design: it's a game, it's meant for all ages, and it's meant to be fun and educational.

I chose yellow as the primary color to stimulate creativity and alertness - with purple as its dark mode complement to provoke curiosity (and it looked nice). Then, I chose a whimsical border style for all of the components that sort of mimicked a sticky note. The handwriting style fonts tied all of this together into my theme of lighthearted, school-age fun

User Experience

I went through over 100 revision stages, which included both self-testing and user testing. Key features of the user experience included: accessible feedback, consistent styling of interactive elements, and of course, bug fixes.

Clear, accessible feedback was very important in user testing because if my users cannot quickly understand the game mechanics, I would not have a successful game. Text messages in addition to color changes, clear button & font separation, explicit directions, and useful error messages were all important considerations I had to make when refining the user experience.

Conclusion

My most expansive and complicated project to date - I'm grateful that it was also my most enjoyable project. Bringing a childhood game to life in such a fun and personal way was such an amazing addition to my coding career.
The design process was very smooth and I could clearly see my growth in the speed and execution of my designs.

Go Play Now!

Ondre Johnson