Overview
FM26 was a big task. A new game engine meant new possibilities, and the brief from the creative director was to refresh the UI to be more intuitive and up to speed with the modern video game landscape. My ask was to redesign the 'New Game Experience'. This included the first screens the user would have to interact with when the game first launched, including the character creator, club selector and main menu.
My Role
UX Design Lead
UX design | UI design | User Research | Information Architecture
The Problem
One of the biggest changes in Football Manager's history is that the series is planning to move to a new game engine (Unity).
This comes with new graphics, new UI and a huge anticipation and buzz for the gamer/consumer. The New Game Experience needs an overhaul from FM24 to meet users expectations for the redefined version of FM.
Research and Discovery Phase
This piece of work was a big, multi-discipline feature for FM26. I collaborated closely with narrative design and game design to ensure all of our design goals were streamlined and working in the same direction.
We had kick-off meetings with stakeholders and the QA team to understand more about user frustrations with the current new game experience, and the main improvements that need to be made for FM26.
The UX design goals of this project were:
Reduce Friction: make the game setup process intuitive whilst maintaining a high degree of personalisation for the user to set up their game world as they please.
Introduce the Game World: highlight the depth of the game world as an entity to the user, making them feel part of an immersive experience.
Highlight Feedback: how does the character creator have an impact on the game world? Make the users choices feel like they are causing an effect in-game.
Combined design goals
We looked in detail at the existing new game experience to understand the positives and negatives we can take when redesigning.
Design Phase
After the initial product discovery phase was complete, myself, narrative design and game design collaborated to map out all the new features we need, the user flows and how each of these are going to function.
From here I began looking at the start of the new game experience process which was the character creation. This would be the first time the user was exposed to the brand new graphics engine and therefore we needed it to allow for greater customisation options whilst ensuring the UI is intuitive to use.
After a lot of collaboration with the graphics team and the engineers, we had a character creation flow that was ready to be implemented and tested.
I then followed this process for the club selection phase, ensuring our two highest priority tasks were tackled first to allow engineers time to implement, and also to allow time for testing and iteration.
High level user flow.
Documentation including user flows and system explanations.
Low and High Fidelity Mockups
Here is a collection of mockups designed as part of this process:
World Cup 26 Nation Selection
Character Creator
Quick Start Team Selection
The Outcome
Due to a lot of technical restraints to the rest of the game, this feature required multiple rounds of descoping and simplifying some designs. However, this gave an opportunity for me to prioritise the areas that caused the highest impact to the user experience at the lowest engineering cost. Overall the new game experience was received well as an upgrade on the existing flow for FM24.
