Moggers
The World of Warcraft community’s need for a centralized place for "transmogs,” i.e. in-game appearances or “mogs” for short, led me and 3 others to create Moggers, a site for players to share and discover transmogs.
No one site
Players posted everywhere: on Reddit, in obscure Facebook groups, or equally obscure World of Warcraft forums. There isn’t a large collection of mogs to browse and sift through.
No gear info
Players listed their gear manually or use the “Narcissus” add-on. Narcissus doesn’t link to the “WowHead” database, so those who want to use a piece have to look it up.
No search or filter
Mogs posted on Reddit, Facebook, or forums are not tagged and are not searchable, forcing users to save images to their desktop.
I interviewed 10 players and identified 3 user personas:
The lurker
Lurkers are scrolling for inspiration. They will upvote a post they like without too much thought. Lurkers don’t comment on a post unless they feel strongly about something. Don’t care enough to post
The casual
Casuals like mogs enough to post them. They post in order to share with friends, inspire others, create their own portfolio, or simply because they’re really proud. For casuals, it’s all about the fun. Casuals fear the occasional rude comment from elitists.
The elitist
Elitists love mogs so much, they take mogs to another level. They evaluate mogs for the variety of pieces, whether it matches the theme, etc. Elitists tend to leave (sometimes mean) comments. Interested in transmog competitions and ratings.
“For once, people could really be the characters they wanted to express in a virtual reality.”
“Before that, you would constantly see characters running around in sets. Transmogs gave players creative freedom. It’s weird— it’s such a simple system, but it’s got such significant implications. Transmogs made it possible for players to take pieces that they thought represented their characters and put them on. It’s really important because people who care enough to post open up the doors to lurkers to find out where these pieces of armor come from.”
— Player “g34rg0d”
We created Moggers, an add-on that stores character data in a QR code, which is then read when the user uploads a screenshot of their character to the Moggers website.
To create Moggers’ UI, I took inspiration from other image-sharing sites like Dribbble, Deviantart, and Pinterest. I researched World of Warcraft to incorporate elements from the game into Moggers’ design.
Though development halted, this project taught us a lot.
For me, I had to reach out to users, decide the brand direction, design responsive layouts for different screen sizes, and manage marketing.
Upon resuming this project, I’d like to have users test the alpha site and give feedback. I could then refine the UI and interactions, write more guidance on how to use the add-on, and ideate more on how to display images and comments. If there is enough interest in the app, we can build out more features like contests and ratings.