04 ——— Ankama

Solving Visual And UX Problems On A Game Launcher

Introduction

I helped Ankama on the UX issues they had with their game launcher, an interface to discover and play all the games from Ankama. Ankama is a French digital company, specialising in creating animes, videos games or comics like Wakfu, Dofus or Krosmaga.

Year

2018

Work

Freelance

Link Launcher
introduction ankama
01 Wireframes & Prototype

After a couple of meetings and digesting the work and exploration that was done, I started by creating wireframes and user flow. The idea was to help players to find new games, get updates and play every game that Ankama published.

Wireframes

The main difficulty was to think about all the small interactions and information it could have on a game page. There is one button type, but its state changes a lot; it can have a downloading state, playing state or update state.

Prototype

One of the issues was to create a universe for every game, without every image being in a box. Since it’s a desktop app, the ratio of the window can be anything. Prototyping this part of the interface helped us to test and validate every situation.

02 Interface Design

After the validation of the wireframe and testing the prototype, I worked on the interface element. I tried to take in as many of elements as I could get on the diverse Ankama platform (website, game, book ...) to create a consistent experience.

launcher ui login
Login screen
launcher ui installing popup
Installing game popup
launcher ui doawnloading
Default screen when a game is downloading
launcher ui template
Same template for an other game
launcher ui popup
Update popup
launcher ui settings popup
Settings popup
03 Styles Guides

I added in a document every asset created and another one with some explanations. I tried to design elements so they could be as reusable as possible, and I wanted them to be as flexible as possible.

style guide
Sample of the design assets
04 Exploration

Experimented with some of the abandoned design. Tried to play with textures for the border of the content where it could change depending on the game. I also explored other types of layout.

concept image
Concept with stylize border for each games
concept image
Other layout exploration
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