Minecraft Redesign

Goal

The assignment was to take Minecraft and redesign their inventory system to solve for Problem Statements that you identified. This project didn't involve any implementation and was purely wireframes. We had 1.5 weeks to make a base design before getting a design pivot which we had 3 days to design around. 

Statement 1

Create organization options, so players don't have to spend long periods of time organizing. 

Statement 2

Simplify the base Inventory System, so players don't feel the need to mod to play. 

Statement 3

Modernize the Inventory System, so players feel that the game is current. 

Research

User Research

I made some initial wireframes to test some ideas I gained from my research. Based on those wireframes I gained some information from the players:

Main Idea and Sorting

Durability and Character

Recipe Book and Tagging

The Pivot

I showed the design to my professor and was given a pivot and feedback. 

The pivot I was given was I needed to create load-outs; specifically mining, combat, and building load-outs.

In order to understand the aspect of loadouts I did additional research:

Changes Made

​With my Pivot being load-outs, I felt the scrolling through the lines of inventory as your Hotbar just became confusing. It already had some issues with knowing what lines of your inventory you were at and to keep that with being able to access load-outs confused things more. 


Based on the feedback I got on sorting I decided to change how it worked and looked. Firstly, I made the dropdown always go down. It does cover items, but I felt that keeping it consistent was important. I also made it, so things automatically sort instead of pressing a button to sort. When I did some user testing, I had a few people wanting the option to combine their items if they had multiples. I decided to add such an option for both the inventory and the chests. 

To adapt to the loadout pivot I decided to add a bar on the bottom with the load-outs. I wanted to give the player the ability to find items in their recipe book and put it on their loadouts. I also chose to allow the player to create their own loadouts. 

There are 5 loadout bars that the player can have. They also can delete previous loadouts to create new ones. To distinguish the loadouts each one has a specific image associated with it. This also helps with the cap because the player must choose which image to use.  

Post Pivot

Loadouts on the Hotbar

Changing Loadouts

Missing Loadout Item Hover

Combining

Sorting

Things I Learned

As a student this was one of my first UX projects focused on improving an existing design as well as having to change my design based on the Stakeholder's wants. I was extremely passionate about the quick swapping hotbar feature, but that didn't align with what the Stakeholder wanted so I had to give up on that feature to make sure the required Loadouts Feature fit into the overall inventory Design. Additionally, in doing this I wanted to improve a lot at once based on the User wants/needs, and I should have focused on one feature at a time instead of a lot of different improvements. Doing so would have made it easier to iterate the actual wireframes and made the pivot easier to adapt to. This project helped me figure out how to articulate my designs to Stakeholders as well as how to focus on my feature designs.

Wireframe iteration