When the team decided to tackle the whole Inventory system of EVE we knew it was going to be a massive undertaking. It was the largest change to an existing essential UI system since the game had launched. Players had gotten used to using the old system and many had developed expert skills. We set out to fulfill a few goals.
Use one window for all assets in EVE to free up space in the game client and unify the mechanics of inventory management.
Improve the usability of inventory management in EVE by giving players detailed info at a glance about the location, status and ownership of assets.
Provide more options in the Inventory for veteran players while making it easy to learn for new players.
Make functionality of asset management consistent across the whole game client.
When we released the initial version of the Unified Inventory to our test server the players had a hard time adopting to the new system. At the time, we had not started using User-Centered design or Usability testing where we would do on-site evaluation to see where the flow of interactions was breaking. Therefore we could only rely on reading the forum feedback which didn’t give us a clear picture of the problems players had with the system. It was hard to filter through what feedback indicated an actual flaw in our design and what was just so different from how it used to be that players needed time to adopt. Players had not seen a UI change of this scale in the past and it became clear to us that we needed new methods and processes to ensure better alignment with the player needs and get feedback to large changes in the UI much earlier. The team learned a massive lesson through the development of this feature which resulted in us starting a new UX movement within the company and advocating for doing a constant iterative loop of rapid design prototyping and user testing before taking features to our test servers because once features had been deployed on a test server we would have between 2-5 weeks to react which gave us enough time to fix bugs and defects but not enough time to make drastic changes to design and implementation decisions.
To learn more about my involvement with the Inventory feature you can check out these Developer blogs.
