Teyvat Traveler

Designing for the ease of Genshin Impact players.

Timeline: March 2023, 1 week

Role: UX researcher, UX designer

How might we make Genshin Impact a more straightforward and personalized experience for all players?


    Genshin Impact is an open-world role-playing game with around 65 million players worldwide, and ranked within the top ten in adventure games on the App Store. However, players often encounter large learning curves due to the overwhelming amount of content and possibilities for their characters. How might we create a tool to assist players of all levels streamline their playing experience?


A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF GENSHIN IMPACT


  Besides its stunning graphics, Genshin is often characterized by its sheer vastness. It is not uncommon for players to easily rack up hundreds of hours on this game that is constantly being provided with updates and new content.

    Being an open world game, a large emphasis on exploration is present in the game. (The map is so big that one player spent 8 hours walking around the entire perimeter.) Materials are hidden in every nook and cranny, and are essential in the upgrading and improving of items and party members. Thus, spending significant amounts of time farming for particular materials is highly rewarded.

    Combat, on the other hand, is completely party based, consisting of at least four characters at a time. Every playable character in Genshin Impact has unique attributes and skills that set them apart from the rest, all with varying playstyles and roles. A strong and balanced team composition of characters of varying elements is essential to maximize damage. 

“How do I acquire such characters?”, you may be wondering. Of course, it’s Genshin’s infamous gacha mechanic! Players spend in-game currency to roll (basically gamble) for various weapons and characters in order to further develop their team – and test their luck.

    Overall, Genshin Impact is a game that draws you in with its free-to-play (or so they claim) system, appealing graphics, and exploration – and locks you in the grind before you know it!


1. EMPATHIZE: USER INTERVIEWS AND RESEARCH


In order to understand the needs and pain points Genshin Impact players, I conducted 6 20-minute interviews of players of different experience levels to gain more insight into their perspectives.

  • How did you start playing Genshin?

  • What do you enjoy the most about Genshin?

  • What aspect of the game do you spend the most on?

  • What was it like as a beginner?

  • Was there a significant learning curve when you started playing?

  • Do you play with others? If so, tell me about why and how.

  • Are you involved in any Genshin communities? Reddit, Discord, etc.

  • Have you used any third-party apps to help you when playing?

  • How do you feel about the game's gacha mechanics?





I pulled insightful quotes from  interview and placed them into two major categories: learning curves when playing, and common solutions to their struggles. I found a few running themes after conducting my user interviews:


1. Building teams and characters is important. All of the players emphasized the necessity of building strong teams by leveling up characters and equipping the right weapons and artifacts (stat-boosting accessories). Players are virtually unable to advance at a certain point without a strong team composition. Many of the late-game players ended up running dry of lore/story content, and shifted their goals to maxing out their team stats in order to clear out enemies faster.


2. But it’s complicated! The amount of customizable mechanics is intimidating at first. As a beginner, players were overwhelmed by the amount of additional content they had access to after the tutorials stopped holding their hand. Most commonly, the weapons and artifacts that players must customize in order to upgrade. It is unclear exactly which weapons and artifacts to choose for each character, as they all vary in specialty.


3. The internet is your best friend. Players often referred to Youtube tutorials and guides for information on how best to navigate the game and build characters.




2.  DEFINE: USER PERSONAS


    After hearing from a wide range of players, I constructed three user personas that captured a spectrum of experiences, goals, and pain points in order to better inform my designs. Meet Jane, Jodi, and John!


3.  IDEATE: WIREFRAMING


I began designing a third-party app that would assist players by minimizing the sense of overwhelm and providing a personalized experience for players of all experience levels. A third-party app would allow the user some much-needed space to improve their gameplay on their own time – without the cognitive overload often caused by the game itself.

    While a few third party apps already exist for Genshin Impact, none of them have personal recommendations to the player, and solely act as a long-winded encyclopedia.

    Thus, some key features I included were: an onboarding that allowed users to input their current game status and overall goals, personalized recommendations for unique builds and characters, and suggested videos made by other players corresponding to the user goals and current game status.



4. PROTOTYPE: TEYVAT TOOLKIT

    After sketching out the main three features and frames, I developed a preliminary prototype for the app. I sought to imitate the game’s UI and graphic style as closely as possible by using Genshin’s illustrations/assets and font, but adapted it into a sleek style suitable for small mobile devices.

    Meet Teyvat Toolkit, whose name originates from the world in which Genshin takes place. Teyvat Toolkit ensures that every player – from Adventure Rank 1 to Adventure Rank 60 – is provided with the unique assistance they need to further enhance their Genshin Impact journey and make it better experience!



TAKEAWAYS


1. The necessity of user empathy: conducting multiple user interviews with a wide range of players truly allowed me to understand how unique the Genshin player experience is. It widened my perspective, but also allowed me to identify a few key pain points expressed by all the players.

2. The importance of staying grounded: with such a nuanced and complicated game like Genshin Impact, it was easy to get carried away when determining the scope of the product I wanted to design. But throughout the course of this project, I constantly returned to the takeaways from the user interviews. Ultimately, as a designer, I was there to address the problems of the player as efficiently as possible.

3. The effectiveness of the right UI design: one of my biggest goals while developing the prototype was to stick with the visual style of Genshin Impact. By using similar iconography and visuals, I was able to retain the visual appeal and detail of the game while adapting it for a different purpose.