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Expertise

About

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.

Work

Expertise

About

Reach Out

The Lego Group expanded their digital portfolio with a new gaming project that would reach a thriving market segment beyond their traditional audience.

Gameloft has been an industry giant in mobile gaming for over 30 years, so Gameloft Toronto took on the multiyear project to create a Lego game that could engage & excite the large adult audience of mobile gaming.

As the Principle UX Designer for the studio, I worked on broader initiatives in design mentoring & process refinement as well as project work - read more about being the first to introduce UX principles to an industry not versed in the discipline, and implementing design thinking tools like user testing, journey mapping and prototyping to aid existing processes.

Expertise

Product Design

UX Design

UI Design

Design Systems

Mobile Apps

studio

Gameloft Toronto

Website

Role

Principle UX Designer

TEAM

On-site 60+ person cross-functional team with multinational stakeholders

Timeline

4 Years

Industry

Mobile Gaming

Overview

Project Goals

Capturing creativity & nostalgia in an engaging, interactive format

While Lego's digital content traditionally focused on young audiences, the success of The Lego Movie in 2014 demonstrated mass appeal in adults through clever meta-humor & classic retro toy references, prompting a collaboration between Gameloft and Lego to marry modern mobile gaming & the monumental Lego catalogue.

Working with an iconic brand known the world over meant we set out to design not just a great interface for an engaging game, but one that allowed the brand to shine brightest in the experience.

Overview

Challenges

Designing for Ephemeral Brand Qualities

Iconic brands like Lego have priorities beyond efficient flows or high conversions - the experience needed to evoke key brand qualities of nostalgia, creativity, and charm through blending the time-tested experience of the toys with the cultural spark of recent Lego films.

Complex Interactive Game Genre

Strategic team combat mobile games proved a successful formula for other big entertainment brands through its collectible-focused design, despite the genre’s complex mid-core gameplay systems and dense interfaces, so it became the guiding interaction framework of the project that had to be made accessible to our broad audience.

A Broad & Diverse Audience

aFree-to-play mobile games depend on users investing both time and money, so we needed to attract adult Lego fans with spending power through a robust gameplay loop while still welcoming a younger core brand audience with a fun & accessible experience.

Designing for Ephemeral Brand Qualities

Complex Interactive Game Genre

A Broad & Diverse Audience

Designing for Ephemeral Brand Qualities

Complex Interactive Game Genre

A Broad & Diverse Audience

Overview

Solutions

As the sole UX Designer throughout the project, I designed and guided all screen layouts and feature flows, working closely with the design, art, and development teams from concept to launch. While the scope of work was extensive, three key areas of attention to detail implemented holistically across the experience showcase much of the core design thinking that addressed our challenges.

01 Interaction Design

Showcasing Tactile Play

02 Design Systems

Consistency to Foster Familiarity

03 Information Architecture

Empowering with Accessibility

01 Interaction Design

Showcasing Tactile Play

02 Design Systems

Consistency to Foster Familiarity

03 Information Architecture

Empowering with Accessibility

01 Interaction Design

Showcasing Tactile Play

02 Design Systems

Consistency to Foster Familiarity

03 Information Architecture

Empowering with Accessibility

Playful Inspection

All the fun props and gadgets can be seen on your collectible minifigures heroes by spinning them around and giving them a poke on their details screen.

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Playful Inspection

All the fun props and gadgets can be seen on your collectible minifigures heroes by spinning them around and giving them a poke on their details screen.

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01 Interaction Design

Showcasing Tactile Play

To celebrate Lego's 60+ year legacy of the joy it has brought worldwide, we designed fun, whimsical interactions with the core brand products, the Minifigures and Sets.

Immersive diegetic spaces were woven into gameplay features, showcasing a variety of classic and modern Lego, allowing users to interact with digital versions of the tactile originals to capture the feeling of building & imaginative play.

02 DEsign systems

Consistency to Foster Familiarity

Unlike common digital products & apps - which start with broad access to everything and become a more streamlined, focused experience as users develop habits & usage patterns - complex games do the opposite: they begin with a narrow, guided first-time user experience and gradually unlock complexity over time by hitting progression metrics.

This measured ramp-up prevents user overwhelm and churn, but means retention relies on successfully building comfort and familiarity with a vast system of features & interfaces.

Our design system maintained consistency & clarity in modular design tokens across 50+ unique screens and popups, ensuring core interactions felt familiar and intuitive as users progressed deeper into the game.

Features

Atomic Indices

Display Panel

Resource Icons

Shop Grid

Scalable Modular UI

The two main collectible items, Minifigures and Sets, each have several upgradable metrics that users needed to know to plan their resource expenditure for and compare for battle strategies. These collectibles needed to be represented on a majority of screens, often in long lists, in multiple states, and small spaces.

We created an atomic design system: a 2D portrait or animated 3D model, curved colored backer, name, and 3–6 quantifiers, combined into flexible ‘molecules’ tailored to each screen’s needs. Despite many variations, the consistent design language kept information recognizable, helping players quickly find what they needed to strategize.

Features

Atomic Indices

Display Panel

Resource Icons

Shop Grid

Scalable Modular UI

03 Information Architecture

Empowering with Accessibility

New games in the strategic team combat genre typically attract experienced users who understand the complex gameplay systems. However, with a Lego IP, we knew we would also draw in younger and more casual gamers.

Our team crafted an information architecture that felt inviting & accessible to users unfamiliar with this genre’s gameplay, while also offering in-depth interaction & information for strategic users seeking a more typical genre experience.

We achieved this by making the underlying complex systems feel unobtrusive in the interface until users chose to explore deeper levels of functionality.

Tap for Tooltips

Shorthand iconography shows the many complex status effects that heroes can have during battle, but we don’t expect users to always remember their meaning, so a tap & hold on any minifigure on the battlefield reveals all the information a user might need to know to make their next move.

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Tap for Tooltips

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Overview

Outcomes

Working in AAA mobile games gave me novel perspectives of digital product design.

While SaaS applications prioritize efficiency and clarity, games demand more - ‘fun’ is hard enough to design; ‘fun enough’ to monetize is crucial in the free-to-play market. Working as the solo UX expert on this complex project expanded my ability to design for large-scale systems while maintaining user engagement.

Designing a fun, engaging modern gaming take on the Lego IP was a journey of discovery: rediscovering the joy of our collective childhoods with Lego while learning how people connect with the brand today; exploring the complexities and pitfalls of the modern mobile gaming landscape; and finding innovative ways to create accessible, high-quality engagement.

We successfully launched an experience that fit into the brand’s landscape, balanced depth with accessibility, and appealed to both casual and veteran players. My expertise ensured every aspect of the interactivity - from interface compositions and design systems to micro-interactions - was carefully crafted to meet our goals.

Large game experiences are crafted by so many disciplines and stakeholders, and the design was collaboratively shaped with the talented minds of our game designers, economy designers, level designers, UI artists, and producers I had the pleasure to work with. Shoutout to our whole team of 60+ people who made this game come together, through 4 major prototyped iterations in 4 years, with a massive amount of work done that will never see the light of day. Cheers, #GLTOFam

disclaimer

This case study is currently under development.

This case study is a summary on narrow screens with a preview of other content below.

To see more details about the project's solution phases, design process & visual explorations, please download the case study.

Please view this page on a wider screen to see more details about the project's solution phases, design process & visual explorations, or download the case study.