Omega Strikers Systems Redesign

Omega Strikers is a "footbrawler" - one part soccer, one part fighting game, where players compete to score goals while battling with each other. On release the controls were snappy, the characters were memorable, and the gameplay felt polished and clean.

But players struggled to understand and use out-of-game systems, which led to less engagement and investment, and ultimately churn away from Omega Strikers. In this project I go from research to redesign, crafting a better user journey to improve the user experience for cosmetic systems.

You can check out the clickable prototype for my redesign here: Figma

Client:

Personal Project

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My Role:

User Research

Problem Definition

User Journey Redesign

High Fidelity Prototyping

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Results:

Reduced friction and streamlined customer journey, allowing users to easily discover, use, and purchase new cosmetics.

Increased engagement with cosmetic systems, Omega Strikers as a whole, and increased player investment leading to increased retention.

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Intro- Problem Exploration

While Omega Strikers had a successful launch and was lauded for exciting gameplay an exceptional art, it quickly became apparent that their out-of-game systems lacked the polish that their core gameplay loop had. Players complained about lack of clarity, and encountered friction when trying to use them. At best, users would struggle to engage with the system, and at worst this friction would convert to churn, and cause players to leave and never come back. I loved Omega Strikers, an wanted to understand how the user experience of these systems could be improved.

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Research

I started by breaking down what systems Omega Strikers had and critiqued them with my own domain knowledge as a player, conducting an Expert Review and Content Inventory to lay the groundwork for out user research, and help us map the user journey.

Next I did a little Desk Research to start looking at other player perspectives and feedback from the community (Reddit, Discord) about their frustrations with the game. Looking at user feedback gives shape to the problem space and helps to start formulating research questions- asking how and why people are frustrated with a system.

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What's the Problem?

One system that stood out as particularly problematic was Cosmetic Personalization. Personalization options should give players a sense of ownership within the game and allow players to tailor the game to their liking, being a catalyst for active, enthusiastic player engagement, and are important for long-term player retention.

In Omega Strikers players found that there were multiple barriers for players to use the Cosmetic Personalization system to find and purchase a cosmetic that a player may want to use. If players can't easily engage with this system, they are less likely to make a purchase, less likely to remain engaged with the game, and more likely to churn out entirely. This system is the primary form of monetization for Omega Strikers which further cements it as a high-priority issue.

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Looking at specific problems within the system, I found problems with Navigation, Selection, and Discoverability of cosmetics:

Navigation: Players find it difficult to navigate to their cosmetics. Different cosmetic options are split across different screens, and there is no clear indication for how to navigate to each of these screens from the home page.
Selection: Players find it difficult to select and use cosmetics that they own. Selecting what cosmetic to equip is clunky and difficult- there are no ways to organize or search cosmetics to equip them. This issue is compounded by the Navigation problem, where players may not even be able to find the screen to equip the cosmetic type they are looking for.
Discoverability: Players find it difficult to discover and acquire new cosmetics. Similarly to the "Selection" problem unowned cosmetics are not easily findable and differentiable. Furthermore there is no indication for how these unowned cosmetics can be acquired, and there is no direct navigation from discovering unowned cosmetics to purchasing them. This means that even if players manage to overcome every other roadblock and manage to find a new cosmetic they want, they must still do extra work to find out how to purchase it.

For a more detailed breakdown of each screen and the problematic elements, please check out the full case study!

Ideation and Design

I started the ideation phase by highlighting specific problematic elements from the original screens. Looking at the problematic elements helped me understand what was not working and why it wasn’t working to give better insight when creating new elements. Conversely I still wanted to match the existing aesthetic and design style of other screens so I replicated things like font styles, shapes, and colours in a Design System to be used in the redesign.

To further narrow the scope of our task I focused on just one task flow- finding and purchasing a new cosmetic.

This task would still take us through the following screens with the following improved functionalities:

Home Screen: Improve clarity of navigation to Profile and Cosmetic Selection
Player Profile: Ensure that equipped cosmetics are more clearly stated, and that players can more easily navigate to the Cosmetic Selection Screen. Include preview of cosmetics to show how they may appear in game. Regroup settings and options to fit player expectations of Information Architecture.
Cosmetic Selection: Improve clarity for searching and equipping cosmetics and differentiate between owned/unowned. Group similar settings and options to improve information architecture of menu. Enable navigation to purchase screen from Cosmetic Selection.

With these functionalities in mind I completed the initial redesign.

As-is scenario showing Claudia's current journey

User Feedback

After this initial phase of design, I conducted a small amount of user testing with UX peers and players to see if the new navigation was useful and intuitive. I received some small feedback about UI aspects that users had trouble with, but overall the reception was positive. One player noted that with the new UI they could “actually find the icon <they> were looking for, and actually figure out how to get it.” However as with any UX project, development could continue from here with continued iteration on my redesign.

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Between the feedback and my own reflection here are some other changes which we may want to consider:

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Adding a “show earnable/purchasable” as a filter option so that players can find which cosmetics they can acquire right now.
Adding an option to “only show unowned” so that players can easily find which cosmetics they are missing (and set goals towards getting them for completionist-style players)
Re-redesign the Player Profile screen, changing the current popup to be integrated into the right side of the screen. This will allow players more space for browsing cosmetics, while removing some of the redundant “change” buttons.
Remove the link account /delete/support buttons and toggles for “show player name” to focus profile solely on cosmetics. Removed settings can be moved into a “Player preferences/settings” tab under settings
Add scroll bar for cosmetics browsing (hard to do in Figma along with all other interactions!)

Lessons Learned

Throughout this project, one of the biggest challenges I had was learning to work effectively alone for design. Previously I had only really done design projects in teams, and was used to getting rapid and continuous feedback about my thoughts and ideas. Without this feedback I sometimes found myself getting caught up pursuing a certain design or line of thinking because it felt right, but without any tangible justification. This meant that I went down some rabbit holes chasing problems in the wrong direction, or sometimes missed the big picture.

However, I noticed this problem fairly early- when doing the content inventory I was repeatedly going in circles changing the layout and what information I was trying to capture. I realized that this problem was caused by a lack of direction and focus, partly because the project was entirely self directed with no oversight, and partly because the scope of “evaluating all UX problems” was so broad.

It may sound simple, but to resolve this I asked myself “Why are you doing what you are doing?” It’s a basic self-reflective question, but actively asking myself helped me deepen my understanding of what the goal of each design decision was, along with why I thought this change would best achieve it.

I actually wish I did this reflection more than I did throughout the design process- some of the initial changes I made were based on the initial design, and if I had asked myself why I was doing it that way, I may have done them a different way. For example, making the cosmetic selection screen a popup was responsive to the existing Player Profile page layout and the "Change" buttons, but probably could have been integrated into the existing page.

This technique also proved helpful when writing this case study! When you need to justify decisions and explain what and why you’re doing to other people, having a deep understanding of your own thought process helps.

Conclusion/Summary

I started this project with research, identifying overall gaps in navigation and clarity within the UI of Omega Strikers. Digging deeper into these gaps, I identified a high priority problem- that players were struggling to navigate to the Player Profile screen, and had trouble changing their cosmetics once there.

My design focused on improving UI clarity, and gave players better tools to navigate and organize their cosmetic items. Testing with this new design revealed that users had an easier time finding specific cosmetics and a better experience casually browsing their profile.

Undertaking this solo design project without specific guidelines was initially daunting and ambiguous. However, it provided an opportunity for personal growth and learning- I honed my active self-reflection skills, allowing me to better understand my desired goals and focus on the strategies and designs that would achieve it. This experience has bolstered my ability to tackle design challenges independently and strengthened my commitment to delivering user-centered solutions.

Design is a never-ending process of improvement and learning. In this way, I hope you’ve learned something from this, that you can improve on. If not, then I hope this case study has at least been interesting.

Either way, thank you for reading!

-Adrian Lam