
• a Heads-Up-Display (HUD) providing ship and weapons status, navigation and environment awareness,
• Vehicles' parts and cosmetics customisation,
• eCommerce through in-game shops,
• In-game finance and resources management,
• Quantified-self dashboard for player performance analytics,
• Social interaction through in-game friending and group forming (called "squads")
• A multi-channel chat system.

Corvette concept-art by Yuriy Mazurkin.

Aside from ships, players could also customise their characters appearance and garments.
• Qualitative insights through daily user-testing (a.k.a playtests)
• Qualitative insights through one-to-one user interviews
• Quantitative insights through the game client usage data
• Insights through players' feedback (through social media, forums, etc)
• Additional data from the Business Intelligence team

Designers and developers alike had their share of feedback during the daily playtests
• Interaction Design: HUD indications, weapon activations, ships and characters customisation, ship energy management, purchase flow,
• UI Art Direction: visual, animations and effects styles, personal contribution on key UI elements,
• Other UI usability and accessibility topics: access-keys policy, UI layering hierarchy, UI colour coding,
• Iron Galaxy (PS4 version)
• SixFoot (cross-platform monetization)
• UX/UI designers hiring process: design-test definition, tests reviews, remote and in-person interviews.
• UI implementation follow-up: closely cooperating with the UI Engineer team to ensure implementation is by design.
• Progression tree UI art (on top of interaction design)
• Propositions for new gameplay features
• UX evangelisation
• The Lead Game Designer
• The Lead UI Engineer
• The User Research and Business Intelligence team
• The Executive Producer and Game Producers
• Publisher-side stakeholders
• Metracritic gave 72/100 to the PS4 version
• CGM gave 8/10 to the PS4 version

One of the many battle HUD design explorations

This indicator appears on enemy ships as soon as they enter the range of the weapon selected at that moment. It mirrors the crosshair visual evolution. Thus players know at one glance which ships are within the selected weapon range and effectiveness before even moving their crosshair.

The effectiveness indicators are essentially icon versions of the crosshair states
When flying a support ship, the HUD indicates all damaged friendlies in need of help with a glowing cross. Whereas when flying in any other ship, allied support ships are indicated with a cross icon. This is particularly necessary


2) Crosshair: points where guns are directed to, automatically aligns with the Zero point as players rotate the camera angle. Its visual aspect gets additional details as weapons effectiveness evolves from minimal to optimal.
3) Indicators for primary and secondary weapons: shows weapon in use and ammunition countdown until reloading. The name of the mounted weapon (e.g. Heavy Flak) appears briefly on activation.
4) Gun traverse and depression limitation: a visual indicator which fades-in only when the camera angle and the crosshairs gets beyond the gun’s limit. It remains visible until the gun aligns with the camera.
5) Hull structure gauge: shows the ship’s remaining health points, complete with numbers and percentage. It allows players to quickly assess the ship’s structural integrity.
7) Power gauge: shows the ship’s remaining core energy remaining points, complete with numbers and percentage.
8) Energy allocation indicator: show which of the engine thrusters (speed icon), defense force shield (shield icon) or the weapon system (skull icon) are getting extra boost from the ship’s core energy.
9) Mounted Attack/Defense modules: shows which modules are currently mounted on the ship. They automatically activate and ready up when conditions (e.g. range or incoming missiles) for their usage are detected.
10) Ship surroundings: pinpoints where friendlies and enemies detected by the radar are located, using the player’s ship as the central point. It only shows ships outside of the camera's viewport.
11) Friendly ship within viewport.
12) Enemy ship within viewport (and within the selected weapon’s range in this case).
The information architecture for the battle HUD was shaped around the predictable locus of attention. Our test using EyeQuant showed that the new HUD architecture (including font weight, iconography, etc) improved the distribution of player attention. Very importantly, it increased the visibility of both the mounted modules icons and the surrounding ships indicators, while maintaining the absolute requirement of the ship's eminence.

Assumption based locus of visual attention. The most vital indicators were placed within the green zone. The red zone may narrow depending on action intensity.

The mounted modules were no more lost on the top edge of the screen, they were getting noticed.
One of the first candidates for a redesign was the main navigation bar. It is the backbone of Dreadnought's pre-battle experience. The previous version had very few buttons but missed to provide access points to crucial monetization and social interaction features (Squads, Friends and Chat). Overall, the entire structure lacked a clear information hierarchy. It was in essence a group of buttons centered on top of the screen.

Furthermore, the Play button was in fact the access point to the game mode and fleet selection pop-up. Thus, after clicking the first "Play" button of the top navigation bar, players still had to click a second "Play" button to actually join a battle. Also, when in the fleet selection step, players had no other choice than cancelling and restarting the journey if they changed their mind and wanted another game mode. All-in-all, players had to click at least two times before joining a battle. Each time.

Once players click "Continue" they had no way to go back a step and change the game mode. They could only click "Cancel" which closes the battle editor.

After players clicked on the last Play button, it becomes a matchmaking countdown notifier as the game searches for a match

One of the several versions I explored




Players click on Play to join a battle with the selected fleet in the selected game mode.

Players click on the fleet button to expand the fleet-board and select a fleet, click on the mode button to expand the mode board to select another game mode. And go back and forth, forever if needed.

After players clicked on Play the game then searches for a match to join.

The need for a single Battle Editor board was expressed hence it received the lowest score (but it wasn't an option because of scalability)




The new UI style mirrors the flamboyance of figureheads such as the Trident and the Morningstar
• Action: excitement and destruction
• Social: collaboration and competition
• Mastery: strategy and challenge
• Achievement: power and completion
• Creativity: design and discovery
• Immersion: story and fantasy
• Autonomy: the feeling of empowerment and control, of drawing one's own path
• Relatedness: the sense of meaningful community and social relevance