A designers take on Dota 2’s new UI

Welcome to The New Journey

via Wykrhm Reddy

In case you haven’t heard, Valve’s widely popular MOBA game, Dota 2 released arguably its largest update ever on Monday — Dota 2 version 7.00.

It’s a massive update that impacts essentially every aspect of the game from hero selection to spectating games and everything in between. Of all the changes that came with the 7.00 patch, the in-game HUD UI has received the most critical reaction from the community. Across different community sites and hubs like r/dota2 it’s hard to go three threads without seeing a post with suggestions for UI improvements. Some of these comments are absolutely warranted and have really good constructive feedback. Others, meanwhile, are a little less helpful.

Given the flurry of opinions right now on the new UI, I’d like to take a moment to offer some insight into the process behind designing something as big and complex as a game UI.

Design changes are made with a purpose

One of the comments I’ve frequently seen is asking why did Valve change “x” — it was perfect before! First, let me dispel the idea that things were perfect before. There is no such thing as the perfect UI. Design constantly changes to meet the needs of users. Sometimes those changes are small and sometimes the changes are a big. Change, however, is inevitable. Second, no (good) designer changes a design without a purpose.

Whether the change is to make the design more aesthetically modern or to make the UI more accessible to new users, there is always a purpose behind the changes being made. Sometimes the reasons behind changes prove invalid or sometimes the changes made for one reason negatively impacts another. That doesn’t necessarily mean you were wrong to make the change. Sometimes, in order to arrive at something that works well, you need to fail. This is leads to my next point.

Design is iterative

Julie Zhuo, Product Design VP at Facebook, frequently writes about the iterative nature of design. One of my favorite quotes from her writings says:

As I’ve already explained, no UI is perfect and no change as big as the one released in Dota 2’s new update will happen without significant iteration post-release. Incremental and iterative change post-release should be welcomed, especially given Valve/Icefrog’s track record.

A comparison of the old UI (labeled “NEW” in the image above) with a previous iteration (labeled “OLD”).

Hindsight is 20/20 and its easy forget how things have changed over time. A perfect example of this is the bounty mechanics in Dota 2. For those less familiar, essentially the game implemented a mechanic which rewarded a bonus to the team who was behind in the game and managed to score kills on their opponents who were ahead. The idea was to ensure that a team would never get too far behind such that it was impossible to come back in the game.

When this bounty system was first released it was horribly imbalanced. We would consistently see massive swings in game direction, even in pro games. Over time however, Valve tweaked the mechanic until it has become mostly stable today. Similar to the bounty mechanic, iterative changes to the UI will happen. The best thing the community can do is provide clear feedback to Valve what they would like to see and changed and why.

Need more proof? In the two updates released yesterday we already saw several of the top community suggested improvements make their way into the game:

via Wykrhm Reddy

The event log is now on the left hand side like before. Not right anymore. Item icons are now considerably larger in size. The backpack is now vertical and on the right hand sideo of the HUD. Text size of Health / Mana have been increased for better readability.

Design is for people and their needs

Similar to my note that design is made with a purpose, design is also made for people and their needs. Game UIs are particularly tricky to design because there are potentially many different types of people your design is trying to satisfy. Just think about a list of people Dota 2 might design for:

New players

Experienced players

Professional players

New spectators

Experienced spectators

Broadcasters

Custom game makers

And more…

Each of these users have different goals when playing or watching the game. They want different information, process it differently, and make different decisions while in-game. The trick is not to design a UI that can meet every need of all these different people. That’s a bad design trap many designers fall into. Rather, the goal should be to design a UI that has the ability to meet the needs of these different users. This is also one of the big benefits that video games provide in that they are the perfect environment to allow for UI configuration based on user needs and preferences.