Play your way.

Hubble is a mobile gaming concept developed for the UX/UI MicroDegree, Cohort 2, in collaboration with UTEC. It received first place as Best Project. The work connects research, prioritisation, information architecture, prototype testing and a reusable visual system.

My role was User Researcher / Product Designer. This case follows the team’s documented work and the decisions it raised: how to support someone who wants a quiet break as well as someone who wants to compete with friends.

The outcome is an award-winning design project, not a claim of a launched gaming service. Offline play, cloud saves and cross-device access describe the concept; the prototype explores how people would discover and use it.

Hubble began with a familiar frustration: I wanted more satisfying games on my phone. That was a reason to investigate. We asked when people chose mobile over another device, what interrupted a good session, and whether they wanted to play alone, with friends, online or offline.

We outlined three initial recruitment profiles, including more and less experienced players, then recruited five people through our existing networks. Their habits covered mobile, PC and console gaming. This was exploratory research with a small convenience sample.

We grouped the interviews into an affinity map, keeping observations, interpretations and possible responses distinct. Ads, unstable connections, storage and awkward controls could interrupt a session. Friends and trusted stores shaped discovery. Competition mattered to some players; independent play mattered to others.

We compared the five participants across solo/social preference, device choice, competitiveness, frequency and technical familiarity. Vanessa and Josué are research-informed archetypes synthesised from those patterns, not additional interviewees.

The interviews and workshop opened up many possibilities. We used paired Kano questions to examine how people felt when each feature was available and when it was absent. A separate 1–10 importance rating added another perspective.

Seven people contributed to the workbook. The first three features have seven responses each; the remaining nine have six. Showing the distribution keeps disagreement visible rather than assigning a single category to everyone.

Two low-fidelity wireflow versions connected registration, subscriptions, personalisation and game discovery. Early testing with five people exposed unclear parental account creation, plan comparisons and return paths into games.

Card sorting gave us both anchors and disagreements. All six participants placed downloaded and resumable games in My games, and trophies in Profile. Comparing trophies split between Friends (4) and Profile (2). Child-account creation split between registration (4) and Profile (2). The structure needed to respect both the task and the starting context.

Six people then attempted three tree-test tasks. They reached the correct destination in 15 of 18 attempts, but only six attempts were direct, without backtracking. The distinction mattered: a correct destination did not mean an obvious route.

Home offered a route back into ongoing games. Social areas became more closely connected, while progress and trophy comparison could be considered from both a personal and a friends context. The child-account route still required particular attention.

The high-fidelity rounds exposed friction beyond navigation. In the first round, three of five people struggled with choosing three favourite games. The child-account flow left people unsure whose details to enter. One of five was frustrated by having to pay before reaching Home.

We documented possible responses: allow game selection to be deferred, make parent labels explicit, and distinguish Profile from Friends more clearly. These were not all verified fixes. The subscription gate remained a design trade-off, rather than a conversion decision backed by launch data.

The benchmark examined patterns from Netflix, Apple Arcade, Xbox and PlayStation, with broader gaming references. We considered discovery, libraries, resuming, social access and progress. Those observations fed a gaming-focused moodboard and a dark interface with purple accents.

The UI library documents typography, colour ramps, system colours, iconography and component states. Buttons and inputs include size and state variants so repeated interactions can belong to the same interface.

The screens bring those decisions together: onboarding introduces the concept, Home supports discovery, and Friends, Chats and audio rooms organise connection around play. The exported set also includes profile and trophy comparison.

Select “Try the prototype” to interact. Choose “Back to reading” when you want to scroll the case again. You can also open the prototype directly in Figma.

Hubble received Best Project in the UX/UI MicroDegree, Cohort 2, in collaboration with UTEC. The recognition celebrates the project; the research and tests explain the work behind it.

The strongest lesson is the difference between enthusiasm, importance and usability. People could rate a social feature highly and still struggle to understand its interface. They could complete a navigation task and still take a circuitous route. Those distinctions made the next design question more useful.

Today I would recruit beyond the existing network, preserve a clearer decision log linking each finding to its design response, and retest the unresolved audio-room and onboarding questions. I would also separate bundled Kano features so each answer is easier to interpret.