Unfortunately, I can’t show any of the work that I did on the Translucia product due to it not being shipped or released, but I can talk about my experience and learnings from diving into the unknown of Web3 and game design.

Even though my time working on the product was short, I feel as though I grew a lot as a designer and it’s an experience that I am eternally grateful for!

With that being said, let’s dive into a couple of things I learned and noticed when working on Translucia.

So much creative freedom!

Diving into a new space in the world of tech is pretty daunting, but it also let me and the rest of the team flex our creative muscles in a way that isn’t really typical of traditional UX or Product Design these days.

Web3 and the Metaverse is honestly incredible, the possibilities and visions from companies gave me the ability to have almost full creative freedom over what I was designing. I was definitely blessed with an incredible team of other designers, artists and developers which made these ideas achievable and that was a really cool thing to see and learn. Just knowing that any wild functions like Face ID-esque scanning to build your virtual character, or having a community created education hub where users could post and absorb content were things that we could add to this product was really, really cool.

A lot of Product Design principles didn’t really apply.

My experience in design before jumping onto this project was very typical in the way of desktop and mobile websites, with a little bit of experience in iOS apps. When you’re working on a metaverse product, I don’t think I ever found myself applying typical design principles to what we were designing and building.

Things like 44x44 pixel tappable areas for buttons, iOS styling and guidelines and set navigation guidelines really weren’t things we were looking at which wasn’t necessarily a good thing, but understanding that we were building more of a game opposed to a native app helped to make a little more sense out of it.

It’s interesting because I feel like the whole metaverse world has a pretty weird and untrustworthy stigma, especially with cryptocurrencies and their current market crash. You’d think that you would want to bring some familiar designs and principles to make people feel safer when using the product, but it wasn’t really something that was expolored.

Designing games was a learning experience.

As I sort of touched on before with not using typical product design principles, just diving into the game design world was a huge learning curve, mainly because everything I knew about traditional design wasn’t really that relevant.

I’ve never personally been a mobile gamer, and even when I am sat around binging hours on my PS5, the UX and UI of these massive new big studio games has never impressed me, but this seems to be the standard for game design.

It’s as if a lot of Product/UX/UI Design in gaming overlooks the core functions of making things usable and pleasant, but focusses more on something that looks cool and futuristic. That being said, it definitely isn’t all bad, and I really enjoyed trying to push my typical product design thinking into this space to get a different vibe and more pleasant experience when interacting with menus and flows in a game.

Something that was cool about working on a game was having a very brief introduction to working in Unreal Engine 5, I was so hooked in that so quickly, and honestly blown away by how incredible that tool is!

Literally nobody has any idea what we’re really doing, and that was one of the best parts about it!

I’ll wrap up with the statement that no one knows what they are doing (yet!) in this space. Despite having insanely talented game designers and developers, this whole entire space is so new and undiscovered. I remember when we were building the character customisation flows that there were almost no reference points for how this was being done in the metaverse.

I played with a few metaverse products that are out and I really couldn’t find something that I even wanted to use as a reference point. You need to take things like NFT’s and your currency into account and I don’t think that any of the products really nailed a pleasant experience, which saw me going back and looking at how games like The Sims, The Witcher III and FIFA were handling basic character and world building. This is what made it one of the most enjoyable things I have worked on as a designer so far though, having that full creative freedom and my brain almost exploding from how much I’ve learned each day is an experience that I will be eternally grateful for, and I dare say I would 100% do something like this again!

If you made it this far, I hope it all made sense and thank you for reading!