Managing an entire planet and its inhabitants?
In the mobile game Nebulae World, this isn't just possible: it's one of the game's many goals.
Our mission? To let players survey their planets at a glance and decide their future with a single menu.
Economy, living conditions, environment and even political life...
The global management menu should display a high amount of information of all types.
Therefore, no more using a single template repeated for each category!
Nebulae World had already gone through two different menus, neither of which was used much by players.
Both suffered from an unintuitive display, inflicting significant cognitive overload on users.
With this third version, new information and gameplay mechanics had to be implemented.
The challenge was threefold: reorganize the content in an understandable and user-friendly way, add new mechanics, and integrate the menu into the current and future context of the game versions.
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This project, with its very tight timeline, gave us the opportunity to try out a slightly more guerrilla-style approach.
In just a few days, we had to establish a protocol to precisely identify the information users need, as well as how they understand and organize the content.
In less than a week, recruitment, short interviews, and a “card sorting” workshop were all wrapped up!
The biggest challenge here was undoubtedly ensuring the quality of the research we conducted.
In addition to maintaining constant communication with the studio, we took care to draft our protocol in a way that allowed us to verify the data logically and identify any contradictions as quickly as possible.
This way, we can rely on the most reliable data possible to build our prototype.
Thanks to the data gathered from working with users, we now have a clear vision of the new navigation structure to be implemented.
This phase revealed that the previous management menu and its content were drastically different from how users perceived them!
The new system gives us the opportunity to present a logical and much more intuitive organization for users.
The goal: to simplify the experience for the most seasoned players and make it accessible to those just starting out on their adventure.
Did our guerrilla method work?
Enough with the suspense: all 8 testers successfully completed the scenarios with flying colors.
Their completion times, the smoothness of their actions, and their feedback are unanimous: they all found the experience easy and enjoyable and clearly understood the required information.
A success for our small team!
