DevLog #11 My Decks

Welcome to our DevLog for MTG Doctor Phoenix, the next generation of MTG Doctor. If you’ve been a member of the MTG Doctor community all these years, thank you for your support and if you are not familiar with MTG Doctor thanks for taking the time to read our log. This time we are introducing all the new experiences coming to the My Decks feature.

Re-Design Motivation

For the “My Decks” feature re-design there were a couple of elements we wanted to improve like the information provided as well as the overall usability of the feature.

• Glanceability: The original version presented just the name and description, something that made them harder to glance as the number of decks grew.

• Lack of Intuitiveness: The original version placed some of the deck options behind a long press making them invisible to first time users.

• High Interaction Cost: Creating a deck would previously require entering the deck details before being able to add cards to the deck.

New My Decks

For this new version, the decks screen now conveys more information about the deck like format, color identity and we even added the ability to set a showcase image for a deck improving the ability to more quickly pick up a deck we are looking for from the list.

The deck creation process has also been streamlined with this new design. First we moved the “Create New Deck” button from the top of the screen to the middle bottom of the screen, making it equally accessible to left handed and right handed players while also allowing the creation of the deck using a single hand. Additionally we remove the need to provide information about the deck during the creation process allowing us to jump into the actual deck building right away.

Aside from the improvements to the glanceability of decks, another improvement to the glanceability of this feature is the addition of the vertical more icon to each deck item to visually convey the existence of additional options for each deck. This options existed in the original version behind a long press, something that made them partially invisible to many players who were not used to this interaction.

The loading of precons also saw a major rework and it’s now fully integrated with the content update feature (see our devlog on that feature here) allowing us to bring new precons more quickly without having to submit a new version to the individual app stores every time.

The decklist view experienced major glanceability improvements as well as functional ones. For starters the mana and other symbols now stand out more than they do in the original version making the important information more quickly available at a glance.

We also moved towards a better use of the screen real state by only having the sections that are specific to the deck present and hiding the empty sections from view.

Lastly we visually convey more information about a particular section as well as any behavior changes of the controls. A deck that supports a commander will now present different controls than a deck that doesn’t.

This allowed us to also reduce the interaction cost for some of the more common actions. For example when adding a card for a commander deck the amount is preset to 1 while when adding a card to a standard deck the amount is preset to 4 thus reducing the need for additional input in the average cases.

We also reduced the interaction cost for tweaking the number of card copies in a deck and made the experience less intrusive. Where in the original version editing the number of copies required tapping the card, editing the amount in the field then tapping the specific button (4 interactions minimum), the new batch edit mode allows us to quickly update multiple cards and with fewer interruptions and interactions.

This design decision also allows us to make a better use of that card modal to provide a cleaner view of the information.

Closing Thoughts

Thank you for reading this far and for using MTG Doctor all these years. Whether it has been one year or the entire 12+ years MTG Doctor would not have grown into such a great tool as it has. Join us during future DevLogs as we continue to share the next generation of MTG Doctor built on over 12 years of experiences and lessons. 

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