Astroneer UI Exploration
Astroneer by System Era Softworks
Astroneer is a sandbox adventure game that I really enjoy playing at my free time to be relaxed but still get my creative juices flowing. It is an independent game developed by System Era Softworks and there is a lot to admire through the lens of experience design.
Not only is the game visual beautiful, the gameplay is also creative and unique. Yet, what I find the most inspiring above all is the use of diegetic UI within the gameplay to make the experience more immersive.
There is, however, one major pain point while playing the game—the printer menu. In this self study, I am exploring ways of improving its UI.
Current UI of the printer menu
Finding items can be very tedious when the player needs to scroll through a long list of items by repeated pressing on the arrow buttons. As the items continue to increase on the list, this process takes even longer. Sometimes I even find myself having scrolled through the list multiple times before finding the item. In a way, the game asks players to remember the options without providing any visual elements to let the player recognize the options—a contradiction to one of the most fundamental UX heuristics.
The added design constraint brought upon by the diegetic nature of the UI system such as perspective of the interface and sizes of the machines, makes designing the printer menu even more challenging.
I think there are ways to address user experience without sacrificing immersion, and there are multiple solutions that can be explored to eliminate the pain of going through a long list every time the user wants to print something. Some potential solutions are:
Providing visual cues such as icons of the outputs so that players can look through multiple items at the same time, instead of being able to view the one single item after it has been selected
Similarly, provide a tile-view UI for players to look through even more items at the same time
Adding a search bar to the printing machine so that the player can directly search for the items that they are looking for
Categorizing items hierarchically: the player can first select the type of machine to narrow down on the options that need to be gone through
Prioritizing and showing items that the user has enough materials for first
In the end, I think a combination of the above solutions would work the best as that can address more user pain points. I have created a mockup for a potential design solution:
My proposed design of the printer menu.
Of course, there is no perfect design solution, and with each of the proposed design comes with their own challenges and constraints. There are still a lot that can be explored and tested. With each update of Astroneer comes better design iterations created by the talented designers working on the game, and I cannot wait to see what they will come up with next.