Wii U Interface Analysis
User experience case study of a video game console.
Overview
My Role: User Experience Designer
Summary of Responsibilities
• conduct analyses on the current Wii U interface
• document research process, findings, and design ideas
• create prototypes
The Wii U interface analysis project was a UX case study analyzing the Wii U, a video game console. The project involved researching the way that the system's user interface currently functions and improving on it with wireframes. I worked on the project alone.
View the high fidelity prototype created using my findings here.
← Screenshot of the high fidelity prototype
Research and Analyses
The first analysis which I conducted on the Wii U was a SWOT analysis. The SWOT analysis helps to find the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats of the interface in question. Among the strengths of the Wii U's interface are its large and colorful icons, which are clear and distinct. However, it falters in several areas including its jarring background color, use of space, and sometimes confusing icons. There are areas where it lacks in consistency as well.
The second analysis which I conducted on the Wii U was an audience analysis: finding out its primary and secondary target audiences. From my findings, I was able to create user personas.
I also conducted usability testing on the Wii U's user interface. This helped to find problem areas that users encountered on first use and repeated use.
I organized the findings into 18 core problems with the Wii U's user experience. These findings were each given categories, recommended improvements, severities, effort levels to fix, and rationales. An example of one of the findings was after inserting a game disc, many users did not know which one of the UI's "pages" contained the ability to start the game which they had inserted. The UI change which I made in the prototypes to remedy this was to show the inserted game no matter which screen the user was on. If a user has just inserted a disc, it is likely that they would want to play that disc relatively soon, so it makes sense to show it no matter what page they navigate to on the "Home" area of the interface.
Prototypes
After conducting research, I created low fidelity and high fidelity prototypes which implemented the possible fixes devised.
Firstly, I created an overview of the new information architecture of the system in Miro. Changes were made in order to improve usability and legibility. View the board here.
Afterwards, I created a low fidelity prototype, documenting my changes to the design. The low fidelity prototype contains arrows showing where connections between pages will be.
Then, a high fidelity prototype was created. To help in the consistency of the prototype, I also created a style guide. View the high fidelity prototype here.
← Low fidelity prototype (top) and style guide for high fidelity prototype (bottom)