A diary of my design thinking.

What this is:

A place where I will document the thinking behind my designs:

Where do my ideas come from?
The prototyping process and how I approach it.
How and why do designs evolve over time?
When, how and why I make particular iterations to a design.
Analysis and key learnings from user-testing.
Product design considerations.
Creation of key design assests and pitch materials.

What this isn’t:

This is not going to follow a regular or semi-regular schedule. Posts wil be entirely ad-hoc.

Joel Kennedy 5/16/24 Joel Kennedy 5/16/24

#1. UX and IA in card design

Recently I needed to do a complete redesign of the cards for my game 100 Nobles.

The game is a medium-weight hobby game and is more complex than what I usually design. The extra game complexity presented me with a challenge - how to present all of the information on the cards in a way that they could be quickly and easily understood by the players?

Here’s where I started:

Yes, the above uses some AI-generated art (I use it for many of my prototypes to help inspire me - although recently I am moving away from that step as it’s an uneccessary step).

For the redesign I started by doing a deep-dive into the information architecture (IA) of each card:

Firstly, I wrote down all of the elements that I could see on the current card layout:

An image
A card type
Effect text
Effect timing
A card border
A card value
A card reference number
https://www.loom.com/share/8cc9698b8dc143d385dd1aa66c8344e7?sid=72c4737d-f8da-462a-8b1a-298499e545dd