CASE STUDY: DISNEY INTERNAL TOOLS
Our team had goals on making internal tools that would:
Increase efficiency of new product development
Decrease risks in QA phase with code and layouts frequently being customized
Faster ideation for development teams to prototype innovative concepts
Everything Unity based
My Role On Team
As a lead designer, I worked closely with developers to help make internal tools balance UX best practices with their own best practices. I had to understand technical limitations and possibilities with the system. I transformed initial ‘software engineer designs’ to user-centered thinking designs. I had to consider existing developer workflow in Unity & front-end versioning systems like Perforce
Design System
A part of accomplishing this platform tool goal was taking the original revolutionary concept from engineers (OOP - object oriented programming) and attaching a front-end visual system to this.
We design complete elements (prefabs) in Unity that are as wholesome as they can be on their own, but can be the ‘template’ to build upon if customization is necessary. With the visual portion of the code grouped together, we could develop faster, and ensure better consistency between UX patterns, visual design rules & code logic.
Designing Placeholder UI
Once basic design elements were put together, I developed ‘modules’ of full screen UI and/or groups of components to form usability-tested and validated design conventions.
These modules were designed to be common layouts for games, enabling game creation to be faster. The functionalities within the modules are flexible, so even something like a ‘search feature’ could be taken to implement into another kind of layout, with the building blocks in place.
Designing developer tools
Part of this project involved coming up with design solutions that revolved around what developers were already used to, and then optimizing the UX based on complex needs that didn’t exist in the Unity platform.
This process involved vetting ideas with developers and validating user flows through the process of developing a light version of the feature, and trying it out. Making improvements as we went along was necessary–a main goal for us was efficiency in using the tools.
Result
We were able to quickly create game prototypes of different genres using these building blocks within Unity. This team effort was such a good experience for everyone involved! This development method + tools could be used to create amazing games for Disney!