Armchair VGUX: No Man’s Sky

Exploring strange, new worlds — with a strange, new interface

When Super Jump Magazine put out the call for new writers, I was quick to put my hand up. I’ve always enjoyed trying to mix my love for games with my professional interest in UI/UX design, and Super Jump seemed like a great place for me to explore that.

It’s a very natural instinct for all of us to play the role of ‘armchair designer’ when interacting with a product — after all, we’re the consumer. We know what we want.

This is equally true for games, and as a UX designer by trade, I’m constantly finding myself thinking about what games could have done differently in their interface and systems. Sometimes games get it so, so right; Dead Space is a great example of this. And, sometimes, they get it…less right.

Often, my own ideas aren’t much better than what the game already shipped with — after all, the development team has experience and knowledge that we, as consumers, simply aren’t going to have. That being said, I happen to like my own dumb ideas, so why not share them with the world?

So, with that in mind, I hope you’ll enjoy ‘Armchair VGUX’, a series of articles exploring some zany, fun, and maybe even good ideas to enhance the UX of various video games.

While these articles will hopefully have some interesting and insightful analysis, they’re predominantly an excuse for me to have fun mocking up other people’s UI designs. You can expect a lot of pretty screenshots and unrealistic, but hopefully entertaining, mock UI’s.

It’s important to note that the point of this series isn’t to put down the design work that these teams have done — in fact, it’s quite the opposite. I’m hoping that by deconstructing these interfaces, we’ll discover the challenges that the designers faced when putting together the game. This is a series about empathy.