Bringing back the fire to
Guild Wars 2
Reworking the existing crafting system.
Role
Lead Researcher
Tools
Figma
Procreate
Device
Mac and PC
The
Assignment.
Reduce bloat
Guild Wars 2 is an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) that was released in 2012. It's having trouble keeping up with the new crafting additions as a result of expansion packs and DLC released over the last 10 years.
Current players have complained that the inventory system is swamped with information overload but does not contain any details that are necessary to consistently create what they want to make. Many players stated that they have gone through entire multi-step crafting processes for a high ranking item only to realize at the end that they had unknowingly crafted the wrong item.
We worked to reimagine an inventory system that solves this problem.
Our Solution.
Original Design
Redesign
01. Research
The Challenge
Entering into this concept project, my partner Karen Ye and I collaborated to reimagine the flow and appearance of the Guild Wars 2 crafting menu to create a process that stressed seamless integration, ease of use, and most importantly let users quickly craft items so that they could jump back into gameplay as fast as possible.
Our six-week redesign followed the double diamond approach to make sure that we were addressing the challenge and playing with solutions from all angles to truly make sure that we chose a system that worked as best as possible.
Task Analysis Results
(Zojja's Ascended Wand)
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No collapse button
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Items change naming schemes depending on location of player in crafting process
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Overwhelming number of craftable items resulting in scanning roadblocks on the menu, making it difficult to figure out what you're looking for
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Multi-step items: hard to know what you already have in your inventory for what you need to craft
Comparative and Competitive Analysis
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Inspiration from recipe websites and food service apps like Blue Apron for creating customizable item recipes
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C&C revealed general lack of searchability and limited filters for all games
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View C&C here
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Interviewees revealed a strong learning curve between users with prior GW2 experience and non-GW2 players. Feedback from interviews led to a redesign of the filter overlay.
"Crafting in Guild Wars 2 makes me feel confused and overwhelmed"
02. Design
Initial Approaches
All of our interviewees had different methods of viewing recipes (searching, filtering, scrolling, etc.)
We created a prototype that allowed users to collapse all of the item categories, search, sort, and filter.
The filter has new categories based on user interviews.
Two of the biggest issues we decided to tackle were:
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Size of the text
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Amount of words on the screen at a given time
Mid-Fi Reception
03. In Summary
Final Prototype
Key
Takeaways
Conclusions and Next Steps
Looking Back
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This was a great exercise in developing Figma-specific skills and proficiency around components.
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Design with the whole screen in mind, not just the menu. It was incredibly easy to focus in on just designing the menu and forget that the menu just takes up a portion of the screen during active gameplay.
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Have multiple solution paths for a crafting menu is mission critical to a successful crafting session. Players create differently and a successfully designed menu accounts for this.
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I am planning to recreate the final prototype that we crated in Figma in Unreal Engine 4/Unity.