Ava Arnett

Dig Deeper

Ace Attorney ReDesign

As part of a project started in my UX Design 2 class, I was tasked to take a gameplay menu or HUD from an existing game and modify it to improve an aspect of its UX. For this project I had 1 month, and worked exclusively in Figma along with research gathered and organized in Microsoft Excel.

Source References + Guidelines

My work for this was built upon the 2019 PC release of the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy, focusing in on the evidence/profiles menu for critique and improvement.

Alongside that, I set a rule from the outset that in this experiment as if I were being hired by Capcom to remake the menus, I can't rely on changing any icon art assets, or add mechanical differences to the system itself.

Peer Research

In attempting to improve this menu, I first had to search for peers experienced with the games enough to offer feedback regarding how they interact with the menu, as well as what issues or pain points were found in their testing.

My work reached roughly 15 people, not enough to give concrete conclusive findings, however it was enough to take a stab at overlapping problems between subjects.

Initial Findings

Within those responses, the most noteworthy findings were that individuals playing the game would somewhat often have to flip between pages trying to track down specific evidence pieces. On further follow-up interviews, it became clear that this was caused by a combination of factors.

Firstly, elements in the list view sometimes were prone to being glossed over by virtue of their position in the row. Then secondly, icon that were vague, similar, or perfectly identical would lead to players being mixed up during their examination, slowing menu navigation down to double check each item one-by-one.

Iterations

Initially, seeing as document-type evidence was consistently the biggest culprit of being forgotten or overlooked in evidence searches, I considered moving all documents to a secondary screen. However, this idea further cluttered navigation by introducing a third screen. While the screen itself made it easier to tell apart different documents, introducing an extra button to swap to it slowed navigation just as much as it made it faster.

In testing, the menu itself proved easy to navigate however, so the design itself was reframed to instead just overwrite the standard Profile and Evidence screens with its format.

This iteration proved far more successful, and with a mindful eye to keeping the original vaguely "court binder"-styled folder format of the original evidence screen, the design was styled into physically separated tabs on a manila evidence folder.