My learnings as UX designer in Gaming Industry
I have been working in gaming industry for nearly a year now. Prior to this I worked as a UX designer for four years in serviced based company.
I will explain my role as a designer keeping one single screen as reference for now.
During my one year I revamped an entire game the was already available in app store. I worked with the team on adding new features and worked on designing those screens and creating a communicative language for the game by making the icons and buttons in synch. This helps the user to feel he is smarter and need not think before he takes any action.
Now after a year, after all this, I have ended up with many UX issues. One being the scalability of the home screen. The other was that, the home screen which I thought was pretty simple to understand and communicative, actually wasn’t. Through my data analyst in my company I got to know that many a users are not clear where to go as soon as they landed on the screen. In short, my effort of making the game experience seamless to the users has lacked to certain extent.
Based on the problem that user is facing I came to realize that number of elements in the screen being too much, it is overwhelming the users and I started grouping the elements in the home screen.
Then I decided to create a hierarchy of what are the main elements and what are the elements that can be in lower or can be removed from the home screen.
Next, I thought about using color and illustration as visual language to make the information seamlessly understandable to users. I prefer using illustrations that the user is familiar with through other games or can easily understand what it means. In my experience users(casual players) don’t like to read.
Lastly, I thought about having a background to give an experience to a player of that the does as there are so many games out there and the experience that we can provide is in that one or two seconds that we have retain the user.