Flavor vs. Usability

The way I see it, the major conflict in APEX’s design process has been this: Interfaces that look really cool aren’t practical to work with, and vice versa.

What’s the last big-budget movie with a futuristic touch you’ve watched?

Chances are it featured a fair share of sci-fi user interfaces. Some artists are specialized in making only these UIs, taking endless hours to perfect them visually for a few seconds of screen time glory. As a result, they look incredibly cool – but if you take a closer look, they are often extremely impractical and borderline impossible to use by a real person.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have real user interfaces which were designed as pragmatically as possible. Since we tried to create a realistic, grounded experience through a believable and practical UI that our players would actually need to understand and use, we drew our initial inspiration from real pieces of software.

Unfortunately, they look really dull.

That is why, after APEX’s core functions were established and a high degree of usability was ensured, we started working our way back towards cool looks in an effort to strike the perfect compromise between practical design and sci-fi flavor.

To Achieve Realism, Copy Reality

Let’s talk about where our journey started: with functionality. At its core, APEX is an enterprise management software. There are plenty of those to draw inspiration from in the real world, SAP being one example that’s famous here in Germany: