Fortnite
Since joining Fortnite in early 2021, I've had the opportunity to work with an incredible team to deliver many meaningful experiences to our players like the new Sidebar menu system, Social Tags, Looking For Party and the in-game event tab for Ariana Grande's Rift Tour.
Client
Epic Games
My Role
UX Designer
Timeline
Early 2021 – Present
Responsibilities
As a UX Designer, I'm responsible for the end-to-end design of features and systems within Fortnite. I collaborate with Leadership, Product, UX & Visual Design, Production, Engineering and QA teams to concept, refine and ship these features.
My per-project responsibilities are documented below.
Projects
Sidebar was a replacement for Fortnite's social and game menus. It combined all the functionality of both menu systems in one cohesive and extremely scalable interface while also creating room for new features like Social Tags, Looking For Party, Reboot Rally and a new in-game experience survey.
I came up with the initial concept, pitched it and secured buy-in within the Product Team and was responsible for the information architecture, UI layout, and interaction design of the entire interface. I also designed new elements like rich player profiles and contextual player cells which made Sidebar feel like a rich and intimate space.
MOVE THE SLIDER TO SEE A BEFORE AND AFTER COMPARISON
Social Tags are short tags displayed in player cells and profiles that allow players to express their identity and interests to others in Fortnite. On launch, Social Tags had high and immediate adoption and players continue to change their tags to broadcast which games or limited events they are interested in playing.
I was responsible for where and how Social Tags were displayed within the player cells and profiles. I also designed the editing interface for tags that allowed users to add, remove or replace up to 3 tags on all platforms with mouse, controller or touch.
My favorite detail about this project was that tags on a player cell were highlighted when they matched yours, so it was very easy to identify who had shared interests with you.
Looking For Party further built on Social Tags by creating a way to find players with matching tags, and therefore interests, while avoiding the spreadsheet like nature of many LFG services.
I was responsible for integrating Looking For Party into the Sidebar menu system, designing the in-panel interface to change tags and choose which tags were used by Looking For Party, concepting Shuffle to show different matching players, and finally, crosslinking the friends list with Looking For Party when no friends were online.
The in-game event page for Ariana Grande's Rift Tour allowed players to select the show time they wanted to attend and automatically broadcast their choice to their friends in Fortnite.
I was responsible for the page layout and event time picker interface which went through many revisions during development.
Let's work together
If you have a project in mind, or would like to chat, shoot me an email at aashrey9sharma@gmail.com. I'd love to hear from you.