Kena: Bridge of Spirits / Elevating Game UI

“Kena: Bridge of Spirits” is a stunningly beautiful game and one that is near and dear to my heart. Created by the ex-Pixar artists at Ember Labs, I absolutely love this game and so enjoy getting lost in the Shinto-inspired world the creators made. 

But while the world & character design is mint, the UI is unfortunately not in the same league. Inconsistent visuals and unclear art direction create a lackluster UI that sticks out like a sore thumb against the simple, natural Zen-like visuals of the rest of the game.

I decided to redesign the UI and in the process discovered an opportunity to push the overall art direction in a way that prioritizes immersion into the natural settings of the game. This is a work in progress and is an ever evolving project.

From the UX to the 3D imagery* itself, I tackle a lot of different disciplines with this project. Join me in exploring how this already gorgeous game can go all the way.

*Midjourney.com and Runway.ml AI image & motion generation tools used to create some 3D scenes

Adding Depth & Drama

While the austere nature of a game that deals with Japanese Shinto spirit guides provides a solid baseline, there’s a missed opportunity for drama and depth. What makes a (good) Pixar film great isn’t just the delightful characters and animation, but the impact of a meaningful story. While Kena certainly has the ingredients, it often plays it too safe. See how I introduce more drama through visuals and more robust storytelling.

As a way to deepen the connection between the player and the story, I’ve introduced the idea of having more establishing sequences in the early-game to help the player develop a relationship to Kena and the other characters.

Let’s see how we can take that depth and apply it through other aspects of the art direction and visuals.

The previous Title Screen, while quite beautiful and serene, misses the opportunity to showcase the main character. Early in the game’s development, the team was unsure about whether to focus on Kena as the protagonist or rather to focus on the Rot (the cute little round spirits). Remnants of this conflicted direction show up in a few places, the Title Screen being one.

In the redesign, we establish from the get-go the sense of Kena’s epic journey, humble as it may be in tone.

In the original game, milestones and transitions to new chapters tend to go under the radar, when in reality something important had just happened in the players journey. To develop that sense, I chose to lean into the sprawling landscapes and dramatize the somber mysticism already present.

Creating Immersive In-Game UI

The in-game UI, while quite minimal, lacks a clear direction and is often inelegant. The menu, and map, pulls you out of the game into a totally disconnected full-screen UI. This is pretty common practice in games, but as a matter of personal preference I love when everything feels integrated and keeps me as a player immersed.

In the redesign, Kena pulls the map out of her bag in a quick transition into an map view that maintains environmental context. This emphasizes the sense of exploring in a lost forest, while also highlighting the inappropriateness of opening the map mid-battle.

The map itself has also been redesigned to emphasize clarity, with an eye towards priority user actions—firstly, navigation to quest objectives and secondly tracking collectibles. I’ve also reworked the layout and architecture to free up space and put focus back on the map, not on the overlays.

More intuitive navigation means the player can focus on immersion more with each in-game discovery. This extends to battle which has seen a few tweaks to fit better artistically. 

In addition to upgraded visuals for health bars, the ability meter (Rot Actions) has also been integrated into Kena’s health bar. The fan-celebrated UI minimalism is maintained, while effects like a glowing health bar that indicates charged abilities can push the arresting sense of an epic battle replete with swells of intensity.

Using the battle health bars as inspiration, I also redesigned the Rot progress bar.

In lieu of experience gained from combat, progress in “Kena: Bridge of Spirits” is rewarded through the accumulation of Rot, culminating in Rot Level Upgrades. Given that the average player will only experience 3 or 4 Rot Level upgrades, the moment should be visually pretty special. However, currently it’s somewhat unceremonious and visually sloppy. In the redesign, Kena’s body glows as the Rot gather around her, a haptic response accompanies a gentle shockwave as the new, stylish UI fades in and announces the upgrade.

After levleling up and gathering Karma to spend on abilities, upgrading Kena’s powers is a well-earned reward in the gameplay experience. I redesigned that screen as well to bring the UI in line with the new art direction, including placing the screen in the world as a stone tablet Kena quickly pulls out of her bag. The UX is also more streamlined making the icons easier to read and the overall layout cleaner and more intuitive.

Style Guide

Wayfair / Growing Ad Tool Adoption

As the design lead for Wayfair Advertising, one of my major initiatives was to get more suppliers to use our advertising tools. Through discovery research & user-centered design, we redesigned the first-time user experience, expanding its breadth and depth to improve satisfaction, build reputation, and elevate organizational design maturity—and of course, to grow adoption.

One tactic in our strategy was a redesign of the flow users took to create a new ad campaign, focusing on the development of a guided onboarding experience to encourage adoption. 

To set the department up for success for this kind of product discovery, I first partnered with leadership and identified a personnel strategy. To do this, I formed a task force of 10 cross-functional team leads to collaborate on creating a 1-year discovery roadmap together. By anchoring the discovery to existing business & product strategy, I could be certain we were all headed in the same direction.  

Tackling our first problem—low adoption of Wayfair’s product advertising tools—meant starting with discovery research. The research goal was to gain insight into the key behavior that correlated with adoption in order to then design for that behavior, nudging suppliers towards successful adoption. After a few supplier interviews, we were able to discover that behavior and set to work exploring solutions.

I created a prototype for a guided, choose-your-own-adventure onboarding & first-time user experience that focused on in-context education and frequent performance monitoring, complete with a helping hand from Wayfair to help suppliers analyze their data and pivot their targeting if needed.

After some validative testing it was time to start exploring more screens while simultaneously working with our Design Systems team to ensure compliance and collab on new components as we moved into high-fidelity.

The team started implementing changes incrementally, seeing the initial signals of relief, confidence, and adoption we were aiming to see. On top of that, the organization started including product discovery as a core OKR & initiative for all future work.

If you want to know more, please contact me and let’s chat!

Unilever / Building 0→1 Health App

I led design for an agile, cross-functional team creating a new holistic wellness platform under Unilever's subsidiary "Pukka Life," an organic tea brand whose mission is to bring eastern medicine to the west. My leadership in design thinking and collaboration with various teams as well as UX and visual design for a native app & web experience led to the successful launch of an MVP, fostering individualized wellness.

With only a broad market concept in hand, we set to work looking for product-market fit for a digital Ayurveda platform and people in Unilever’s target market. I led our remote, global team through early design thinking sprints and concept ideation, collaborating closely with engineers, market researchers, and product managers as we learned about the space. 

To aid our customer research, I created a psychology-based research tool to drive team-wide alignment about customers values, habits, and motivations that was learned from our research, a tricky proposition when working with a distributed team. This helped us build rapport with our client, a traditional direct-to-consumer marketing insights behemoth, winning us additional budgeting and time. 

When our insights uncovered multiple potential digital touchpoints that might work—online courses, coaching, and habit-tracking apps a lá Headspace—we created prototypes to test out each, the learnings from which helped the team create a go-to-market strategy.

Results of testing pointed us in the direction of a habit tracker app, so I set to work developing the visuals, defining the UX of setting up and tracking habits, while also exploring the look and feel for this new sub-brand. 

The team ended up pivoting to a low-cost, out-of-the-box coaching platform based on analyses of TAM and cost-benefit, while from the research & design side we had solid evidence that 1-on-1 health coaching provided great health outcomes for those in the target audience who had sought it out in the past.

We successfully launched an MVP for the platform that linked wellness seekers to the resources they needed while also successfully coaching our enterprise client into modern product practices they still use today.  

If you want to know more, please contact me and let’s chat!

Netflix / Improving Recommendations (Fan Redesign)

Dive into my fan-driven passion project where I tackled Netflix's watching recommendations. Driven by an imagined goal of making Netflix the go-to streaming platform again, I ran a small study and prototyped a new feature to help Netflix users discover new titles with more affinity and satisfaction.

Incidentally, this feature was later introduced in Netflix's official app. Let’s take a look at the work!

Stemming from a conversation during an app critique interview, I wanted to imagine a world in which Netflix takes fuller advantage of its user data in order to provide better recommendations. To begin with, I ran some validative research both quantitative and qualitative to confirm that this was, in fact, a real and valuable enough people problem to tackle.

It turns out, as suspected, that few actually use recommendations from the platform. For the general population, watching was influenced by recommendations from friends, while for “filmies” (like foodies) the attributes of a film or series were equally important. 

That got me thinking about Pandora Radio, a music streaming service that created a complex, internal analysis operation called the “Music Genome Project” where they hired actual musicians to parse all the titles in their library into “genes,” or musical attributes.

Some quick secondary research to validate that listenership is driven by recommendations on music streaming platforms, particularly Pandora, and I was ready to get to work on a new front-page Explore feature to facilitate filmies’ discovery of relevant, impactful recommendations. 

Interestingly, while this was a self-directed pitch project, Netflix actually introduced this feature directly in their official app later that year. I must have been on to something!

If you want to know more, please contact me and let’s chat!

Argo Insurance / Streamlining Underwriter Efficiency

Explore my leadership in streamlining underwriters' workflow at Argo Insurance. Through cross-functional workshops and collaboration on a 4-person scrum team, we launched platform improvements that reduced strain from 60% to 5%, allowing underwriters to focus on writing better insurance policies.

After running a round of interviews, analytics, and observational analysis to better understand brokers and underwriters, I led and facilitated user-focused workshops with engineers, product managers, data analysts, and executives to align us on the insights.

Sketching, wireframing, and prototyping followed, with plenty of iteration alongside the team. A special focus on Object-Oriented UX created quick alignment among a highly technical team.

We introduced a feature to allow brokers to customize their coverage, now allowing them to self-serve a task previously was only manually editable by underwriters. 

The improvements were a success! Over the course of a 6-month release, we mitigated the relevant strain on underwriters from 60% to 5% after full release. This freed them up to spend their time writing better, more profitiable insurance policies.

If you want to know more, please contact me and let’s chat!