Ixd & IA: Flow Analysis

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Game Controller User Flow:

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Objective:

Project

Porting the game “HALO: Master Chief Collection” from the XBox platform to Steam on the PC. This required adapting a Game Controller driven interaction pattern into one that supports a mouse and keyboard pattern.

Objective

Create a comprehensive, end-to-end flow diagram of the current Xbox interface for the MCC app. An end-to-end map of the complete interface did not exist so before a strategy for moving to a mouse & keyboard interaction pattern was undertaken the team needed a clear picture of the users interaction flow.

Process

Cross-Functional Collaboration: Besides myself, we had two others on the team.

• Flash developer who was tasked with documenting all of the Flash scripts that drove the UI.
• A UI artist who was breaking out all of the existing wire-frames in Adobe Illustrator.

Reverse Engineering an Interface: Since documentation was sparse and incomplete the only way to get document the full interaction flow was to play the game and start mapping out the experience.

• Start by understanding the high level information architecture. How was the functionality layered to support a broad range of features and user goals.
• Next dive into each of the functional sub-systems and menus to fill out the feature specific IA structure.

Hidden Functionality: As with all full-featured game titles a lot of functionality is unlocked or dynamically changes based on a players progression through the game experience and the MCC app was a collection of 5 full-featured games, each with their own progression, some title based and some shared across all titles.

As the team, each working with different categories of assets got deeper in to their discovery phase, lots of hidden functionality began to emerge.