What is an UI Designer？

This is an explanation from 【UX of Game Career Theory】Take you to recognize the UI, GUI, VX positions in one step – NetEase Game Academy – Empower love

Since all the software we use on a daily basis relies on UI design, I have a general understanding of the industry’s key functions. However, game UI design is actually not as simple as one might think. From the feedback provided by playtesters, I noticed that users often interpret the meaning of icons differently than the designers intended, so I decided to research some other, more established UI designs.

Screenshot from Arknights：Endfield

Screenshot from Arknights

Screenshot from https://dribbble.com/shots/24047061-Lost-Legends-RPG-Game-Illustration

Personal Reflection

After reviewing the project, I realized that for a UI to be immediately intuitive, it needs not only well-designed icons but also text labels. In this project, I didn’t think of this in time, and because of space constraints, I didn’t include text labels, which led to frequent feedback from players that they found it difficult to understand.

Screenshot from GDD ，the draft of the UI design

Screenshot from our game，since some of the mechanics weren’t implemented in the end, a few icons were removed.

To make them easier to understand, I added symbols to the icons, but even during the final playtest, we still received feedback that the icons’ functions weren’t clear. Fortunately, since the icons’ meanings didn’t have a critical impact on the gameplay experience and were intended solely for guidance, we included on-screen prompts during the game to guide players on what to do.

UI designer in the Gaming Industry

I used to think that UI design was a single role, but after doing some research, I discovered that it actually involves collaboration across different roles. I searched for UI-related positions on miHoYo’s job portal, selected a few that caught my interest, and took screenshots of them.

Screenshots from https://jobs.mihoyo.com/#/campus/position