Amazing UX/UI Design Inspiration – October 2024

UI Element for Star Wars: Jedi

Submitted by Joe Deutscher

I met an awesome UI/UX designer named Jordan DeVries at the 2024 Game Developer’s Conference, and he inspired me to up my game in the UI space so I could start landing the jobs I wanted to get in game development. When I heard respawn was hiring for a UI Designer for a new Jedi game, I decided to shoot my shot and create a concept for it.

When I started researching the first two installments in the Jedi series, I was extremely discouraged—because as far as user interfaces go they are damn near perfect. All I could think was, “How can I possibly improve on this?!” After many sleepless nights, I decided to just start recreating elements from their user interface to see how it felt to create the original interfaces. From that, the ideas started pouring in, and I soon settled on the metaphorical color palette and came up with the pause widget navigation.

For interface controls, I wanted to make them as smooth and reactive as possible. Subtle animations appear on every control, including button presses, joystick directions, boolean toggles, and sliders. I took some inspiration from Google’s Material Design by implementing a ripple-like glow.

It’s pretty common to see tabbed menus in video games today, especially campaign driven ones. Though they’re commonly used in games (partly because there isn’t a much better alternative), I’ve never liked these menus. I find it disorienting to switch instantly between pages, and dislike the fact that you have to often go through multiple pages to get to the page you’re actually looking for. My solution was to utilize the right joystick, a commonly neglected input when it comes to navigating menus. Flicking it summons a radial menu, which allows the player to access the desired menu with fewer button presses.

In the skill tree, I felt that the radial skill menu from Final Fantasy VII Remake was a great idea to borrow, but needed refinement. My skill menu reflects the player’s journey as they earn new skills, by having them carve out a path through the skill menu galaxy just like they do in the story. Certain planets unlock new solar systems, or groups of skills.

Accessibility is a big concern for larger studios. One thing that I think would benefit modern games is the inclusion of a search feature for the settings menus. In games with lots of settings, it can be difficult to find what you’re looking for. Sometimes a setting may be worded in a different way than the player knows it by, causing them to miss it. The addition of accessibility features ironically often makes finding settings more difficult, as visual and audio settings are divided into their own categories as well as into the accessibility category. A search system, preferably with a voice option, would make this process much simpler for anyone who ever fiddles with a game’s settings.

While ultimately I did not land the job at Respawn, I received pretty glowing reviews from the hiring manager and several other developers. I’m really encouraged by the whole process, and can’t wait to try again!