I led design for a game design tool that increases the accuracy and decreases the time required to design characters for games and animation. I utilized strategy, defined key metrics, discovered core actions, and shipped a polished design.
Overview
Capes is an AI powered game design tool that makes game character creation faster and easier than ever before. My task was to design a tool for beginners as well as professionals that could be used for easy designs as well as complicated character and landscape design.
Challenges
I encountered three main challenges:
1) Slanted and Enchanted
Our first users were young students with the little to no background in design tools or intricate software platforms. They needed to be able to navigate the platform without roadblocks and it needed to be sticky. In order to achieve this we I needed to mix familiarity with magic. They needed to be wowed quickly and convincingly.
2) A deeper understanding
Understanding our users was key. I spent an entire year visiting schools across the country and running test to better understand the daily habits of young students. While doing so, I learned three valuable lessons.
- Students have no loyalty to platforms or studios
- All students are creative
- Student attention spans are almost non-existent
3) The space between
I need to design a platform that breathed life into the user, bust also gave them space to create on their own. The idea is to give them tools and direction, but not too big of a toolbox and not too much direction. Designing this feature was a balancing act of multiple contradictions.
Lo Fi Wireframes
My experiments always start with Lo-fi Wireframes. These sketches help understand the solutions to the problems I'm attempting to solve.
Innovation
I wanted to design a hybrid of a traditional design platform, while also focusing on minimalism and space. I wanted to the focus to be on shapes and what you can do with with. ( side note: you can create worlds with shapes!! )
Duplicity
The ability to duplicate shapes is one of the foundations of design software. I wanted to figure out how to do this seamlessly and help our users see the creations they're envisioning in their minds much faster than the status quo.
Bright organization
The ability to manipulate color was wildly important for our users and it needed to be at the forefront. We also needed to help our suers stay organized. Finding an organization tree that could help our users achieve their goals faster was at the forefront of the low fidelity wireframes.
Design Principles
The Ui for this is platform and feature was at the top of the hiearchy of importance. The tool needed to feel warm and welcoming. Design tools are traditionally cold and intimidating. I wanted to focus heavily on minimalism, space and shapes for the design of the platform. The same principles the platform is built to teach designers are the same principles we used to desig nthe platfrom itself.
User Journey
What does the user want to do? What can the user do? These were the two most important questions we had to answer when creating an experience for our users. We needed to find out what were the most important aspects of design the user was interested in and design those elements to be useful and easy to grasp.
Expanded User Journey
After discovering what the user wanted and how to get them there, we need needed to make certain those elements in the journey worked according to our design plans. It was important that the aspects of the feature the user would engage with the most worked as planned and guided them through their journey in a magical and meaningful way.
Designs
Pulling Shapes
The ability to manipulate a shape is the foundation of design. Shapes are design. Manipulating them to form something that no longer seems like a shape, but something real that you can feel and touch is goal of every design platform and art creation palette.
Manipulating Colors
Color ind shape go hand and hand. The first thing every user does after creating their first shape is to choose a color for it. This is the beginning of the users design coming to life. Place at the top of the design hierarchy was of the utmost importance. I wanted to place features on the side panels by order of importance.
Duplication
Once the user has created a shape and colored said shape, the next step in the character design journey is to duplicate your shape. This provides accuracy to your design. I wanted this to be a major focus of our tool, largely because it helps new users create in a faster and more accurate way. User fatigue is a massive problem with design tools. by making this feature a high priority aspect of the toolbox it ensured our suers would be designing faster and better.
Shapes into objects
The speed at which we were able to get our suers from shape to object was the entire game. It needed to be at the speed of light. How do we get our users there faster? By placing color, duplicity and movement at the forefront of the platform. We wanted to take away the cold complexity of most design platforms and replace it with fun and precise complexity.
Shape Expansion
Shapes are all different and can be used in different ways to your advantage. Our square's primary focus is to be used as a tracer. We wanted users to use one square to create a range of shapes that will lead to body parts that will lead to characters.
Transparency
One of the last features on our beginners menu was transparency. Users needed to be able to turn shapes into lines, because lines make animation and gaming come alive.
Design Organization
The final aspect of the feature was the organization tree. We wanted to break free of the confusing and overly complex tiers for components. We needed to feel free and fun and human.
Whats next?
I will validate all my design decisions based on user feedback and retention. I'll conduct user research and UX audits to understand where users are continuing on their journey and where they're getting stuck. So far designing Capes has been the greatest adventure of my design career and I can't wait to find what wonderful treasures await me on my journey.