Chain of Jewels UI/UX Design
Overview:
Chain of Jewels was a UI-centric mobile game project centered around grid-based combat.
It’s notable as it was the project taught me the fundamentals of UX design and made me interested in the discipline as a whole.
Learning Experiences:
UX Design Principles - Persona Creation, Visual Hierarchies, Typography, Iconography, basic Color Theory, etc.
Agile UX - Setting milestones, working in sprints, and reevaluating the project to fit user needs.
My Roles and Responsibilities
User Research
Conducted surveys
Compiled information
Helped create user personas
Prototype Design and Iteration
Worked on Mindmap
Created low-, medium- and high-fidelity UI Mockups
Defined and implemented the project’s color palette
Logistics
Team: 4 developers
Development Time: 4 months
Tool: Figma
Platform: Mobile
Design Goals
Conduct research to determine our potential user base
Develop a game that suits our personas likes and needs
Research
User research for the project took the form of a survey that each team member distributed. To gather more responses, I also utilized a snowball sampling method, requesting that initial participants re-distribute the survey to any interested third parties. From this, an interesting set of data was collected, featuring participants ranging from active college students to those graduated with Ph. Ds.
From the final data set, it was identified that users mainly played for short periods and did so when convenient, such as when traveling or waiting for doctor’s appointments. With this in mind, I decided on creating a system that prioritized short bursts of play and easy access.
Research
Using our survey data, my team created a series of personas to align our design goals. While our participants' backgrounds were fairly varied, we commonly found that most had a bachelor’s degree or higher and that most played games when it was convenient.
I personally created Anna, our secondary persona, who was our mastery-focused player. While our primary persona was a college-age man, we had a sizable number of participants who were women, older, and out of college. As such, I created a persona that reflected that segment of our participants.
Ideation and Design
After the initial research was finished, a full mind map was created for the information and actions available at any given time. This allowed us to precisely determine how our wireframes should be laid out and interact with each other.
Having this unified plan for the prototype was immensely helpful for a team of multiple designers working on UI prototypes, and we called back to the map frequently through development.
