Video Game UI Designer Anisa Sanusi on Balancing Design and Activism
The London-based Malaysian designer is the founder of a mentorship program for game industry workers who identify as women, nonbinary, or transgender.
User interface (UI) and user experience (UX) designers are the unsung heroes of game development. They look at user behavior to create the intuitive interfaces and navigation patterns that make games fun, rather than tedious. Yet, despite their crucial work, they usually don’t receive the same public recognition as other game industry employees, like audio designers, writers, or animators.
Anisa Sanusi, a UI designer at Hutch Games, doesn’t mind that people outside the games industry might not know her job exists. “If you’ve designed your UX well, people won’t notice it,” she says. “But if you’ve done it badly, people will notice.” As a UI/UX designer on games like Planet Coaster, Elite: Dangerous, and Top Drives, Sanusi has been named one of the top 100 Women in the UK Games Industry by GamesIndustryBiz, as well as one of Develop Magazine’s 30 under 30.
While Sanusi understands why her work doesn’t get the attention it might deserve, she fights for better representation of diverse groups in the gaming industry. Sanusi, a Malaysian designer living in London, is the founder of Limit Break, a free mentorship program for game industry workers who identify as women, nonbinary, or trans.
Here, she talks about the importance of UI/UX design in games, why she launched a mentorship program, and what games are wowing her right now.
How UX/UI design works in video games
UI design, or user interface design, is about the graphic interface. It’s graphic design. A game typically has a theme, like fantasy or sci-fi, and the UI design will reflect that theme.
UX design is the rationale and psychology behind UI design. A shooter game, for example, has a HUD, or heads-up display, on the screen. It shows how much ammo you have, what gear you’ve got on, where your enemies are, and so on. How these things are presented, and where they are on screen, is UX design. It’s figuring out the best way to display something.
UX design in games is also about general flow. If you want to change weapons, which button do you press to open up your arsenal?
Balancing analog and digital
As a UI designer, the Adobe Creative Suite is the number-one thing I use. I also work with Unity [a game engine].
For UX design, I use a program called Figma, which is a prototyping tool. It’s what we use to put our static designs in motion. With Figma, you can put things together before you actually implement them in Unity and see if they feel good.
I also have about ten different notebooks on my desk. Half of my design work is in notebooks, where I draw little boxes and squares. It’s very pen and paper-centric.
Post-It guidelines
I have Post-It notes with design guidelines next to my screen. A lot of web designers make really clean, gorgeous style guides. But because we’re so agile, I tend to just write notes like “Make sure the header is 26 pixels high.” The notes are right next to my screen, so when I’m designing, I have easy access to consistent rule sets for that game.
Designing for mobile
At the office, I’ve got a monitor and then a phone holder that sits right beneath the monitor. On the holder is an iPhone 5, which is the smallest screen that we design on. Whenever I work on Figma, my design shows up on the iPhone 5 as well, and it updates live. That’s how I make sure that whatever I design on the computer screen looks good on mobile screens.
Where to search for UX inspiration
I follow loads of different websites. I really like UX articles on Medium. You get a lot of people who work in product design and big tech companies who have good insights.
Also, I really like going to local meetups. I’m quite lucky to be in London, which is a tech hub. There’s one group called Ladies That UX. It’s a monthly meetup where women in UX design, especially those who work in big tech companies, give presentations. People from Google Maps have talked about how they did field research. The people from Facebook have come over to talk about products they’ve designed.
User flows and feedback sessions
We get art direction — the theme, the colors — from the art director. For the single-player campaign, we might use certain color palettes; for the multiplayer campaign, certain other color palettes. Then we’ll start designing how we want the screens to look.
Next, we’ll have feedback sessions. We walk through each step of a screen and every single interaction. We’ll ask, “If I click this, then what happens?”
Sometimes we walk through flows. Let’s say a player is halfway through an interaction and then wants to cancel. Are they able to do that? It’s a lot of discussing “What if…”
We’re trying to make sure the player understands what’s happening. The UI should facilitate that as best as possible. Once the player gets really frustrated — “I want to do this, but I can’t,” or “I don’t understand what’s happening” — that’s when churning happens. Churning is when a player just stops playing the game.
The most exciting game UI in years
I think the most exciting UI in recent years is Persona 5. It breaks a lot of rules, yet it works because the style and art direction are so strong. The UI fits with the game’s punk-rock theme. It’s not on a clean grid. It is lopsided, and the fonts are everywhere, and it’s animating everywhere. Usually, unnecessary animation adds to cognitive load. Persona 5 does just enough so that the UI is exciting but still readable.
Persona 5 is the only game where I’ve seen people cosplay the UI. It’s the most amazing thing. You never see anyone cosplay UI.
Why most AAA UI/UX design looks the same
Minimalist design in games is a trend leaking over from general app design and websites. Big tech companies like Facebook and Twitter make their digital spaces minimalist for phones, and then more users get used to a minimalist style.
Also, if you’re making a big game, your UI is a lot more robust. You have to minimize, so you’re not giving users too much stuff. The effect is that a lot of AAA games are starting to look like each other because of the minimalist movement. I don’t think it’s on purpose, but as games get bigger, we need more clarity, so you can read and understand them.
About Limit Break
Limit Break, which launched in April, happened because I wanted a mentor for myself. It’s partly inspired by an Australian mentorship program called Working Lunch, which was started by Ally McLean. She was Instagramming about it, and I said, “I really wish there was something like this in London.” She said, “You can start one, too!”
Because I’m a UI designer, I did some branding work — a logo design, a website. I tweeted about it with some really cool animation, and it blew up. I expected to have maybe 20 mentors lined up, but we’re halfway through our first year, and we have 120 people.
A lot of mentors really wanted to give back, but they didn’t know how. The mentees wanted help but had no idea how to reach out to people with experience. In games, there are so few women, much less women in senior leadership roles. You don’t even know who is out there to ask in the first place.
The way I see it, I’m like Tinder for mentoring people. We’ve got indie devs, producers, programmers, artists, UI designers, businesspeople, PR and marketing…a whole slew of people.
Helping mentees break into the industry
Most people [in Limit Break] tend to stick to one side: They’re either mentors or mentees. But there are people who want both sides. I have both a mentor and a mentee, so I have experienced Limit Break from both ends.
My mentee is Malaysian, and I’m from Malaysia myself. As she is applying for jobs, she’s got a lot of very specific immigration questions, and I help her as much as I can. We discuss what kind of jobs she wants, and I look over her CV and her portfolio.
My mentor is the head of a studio company. To have a woman give insights on how she deals with the day to day…that was what I wanted for a long time. I have never had a female boss.
As a woman, you sometimes think, Am I being too harsh? or Am I being a doormat? And when you have someone with ten more years of experience say, “It’s fine, this is what you should do,” it’s amazing.
Now playing
I am playing Fire Emblem: Three Houses. It’s amazing. I’m a huge Fire Emblem nerd, and I used to play lots of Fire Emblem: Awakening. I’ve been playing loads of the newer Fire Emblem games since Awakening, and nothing scratches that itch as well as Three Houses.
I really like Edelgard. Out of the three house leaders, she’s the only woman. She’s also a tank. She can take anything you throw at her. Champ.
Magenta is a publication of Huge.
