Job Title: UX/UI Designer
Year: 2019-Present
Projects:
Sprung Studios Ltd. is a design agency that specializes in improving the user experience and interfaces of video games, working with clients such as EA, Konami, Activision, and Amazon. I worked as a UX/UI designer with on multiple projects from different clients, ranging from improving specific features within a game to designing the user experience of entire games and storefronts. Every project involved presenting my design ideas to the client and working closely with them to achieve their vision in both an exciting and user-friendly way.
All projects I have worked on at Sprung are currently under NDA, so although I cannot showcase visual materials or specific details, I have shared my general process of select projects and features below. I am happy to discuss in more detail my process and work on these projects in-person. Please reach out if you're interested!
The image featured in the banner is a mobile game UI practice exercise I worked on within the company. The exercise was to reimagine a UI style similar to Clash of Clans, but for a post-apoctalyptic setting.
I worked in a small team and was responsible for designing the user experience of several features in an installment of a AAA game franchise, keeping within the game's well-established and strict conventions while innovating when possible to bring a new, exciting experience to players. I also worked on UI refreshes of the game's store and Battle Pass. Each feature involved many iterations and close consulting with the client to ensure a successful result.
Role:
Loadouts: I was in charge of designing a social feature for loadouts as requested by the client. My process was to familiarize myself with not only the game's existing loadout conventions, but also conventions of other similar screens to maintain consistency throughout the entire system, then conduct research into similar social features in other games, as well as examine how current players of this gaming franchise use and talk about loadouts through Youtube, Twitch, and Reddit.
After the initial research phase, I created user flow diagrams to understand how players might use this new feature and how the feature would integrate into other parts of the game. Once the client had signed-off on the user flows, I visualized the flows into wireframes, making sure to stay within the game's conventions so that players would find it easy to familiarize themselves with the new feature. I presented wireflows weekly to the client and iterated on feedback until all parties were satisfied, then delivered the completed wireflows in a document, explaining design rationale and describing intended behavior in detail.
A new, innovative arcade-style shooter utilizing the increasingly-popular medium of streaming was brought to us by a client, and I was tasked with designing the user experience of all game content outside of matches. This project focused on reimagining regular gaming menus in unique and more interactive ways.
Role:
Game Lobby Navigation: A crucial aspect of this game was to have a unique and "wild" method for players to interact with menus. The client specifically did not want regular 2D menus that most games have. My challenge was to make the group and game-mode selection process as exciting as possible while retaining the functionality of flat menus. To tackle this, I investigated how other games handled group invites, mode selection, and match-queueing to first understand what players in this game would need.
Once I built user flows that would satisfy the basic needs of a player who wants to join a game, invite a friend, choose a difficulty/mode, and queue for a match, I looked at games that had spatial navigation such as Little Big Planet and Overcooked 2, but also movies and websites to spark interaction ideas. I wireframed several concepts to present to the client. The concepts ranged from safe concepts that sought to make repeat actions such as mode selection and match-queueing as quick and painless as possible, to more interesting concepts that sacrificed a bit of usability to make features like mode-selection exciting instead.
This complex project sought to create an extremely easy and user-friendly platform for anyone to create visual novels with. Some functions of the platform included functions for writing, branching paths, and asset creation and management. I worked in a small team to design the entire user experience of the platform.
Role:
Asset Creation and Management: This feature's complexity proved to be an exciting challenge, as they weren't just drag and drop - each asset type in this software had specific rules, roles, and ways they could be used in the visual novel. I had researched visual-novel tools on the market, but there were few choices and none were particularly user-friendly. I expanded my search to other creative tools with asset management, such as Unity, then created user flows and user stories to understand how a new user would learn and use assets within their visual novel.
A particular challenge was to make assets easy for a user who has never used a visual novel tool before, but also efficient for the client's existing users who were used to writing code to create their visual novels. My userflows also helped the client realize many aspects they had not previously considered that were required for the software to work, and allowed them to re-scope the project.
After the client was satisfied with the proposed sitemap and user task flows, I created wireframes of how a user could create and manage assets. Character assets in particular involved expression and outfits; each character had multiple outfits, which would have multiple expression. A character could have 5 outfits, each outfit having 9 expressions for a total of 45 required images for 1 character. The user needed to easily be able to upload, group, filter, and use these outfits and expressions. I worked closely with the client to ensure the designs were buildable, within scope, and captured what they envisioned their tool to be.
Although the main goal of this software was to be functional with a focus on usability, I wanted to incorporate moments of joy to make the visual novel creation process more fun, and was able to add these moments in areas such as at the end of the novel-publishing flow.
