Overview
As a game UXer with love for Bungie's Marathon universe, I conducted a week-long study of their alpha release (April 2025), targeting key improvement areas: navigation, design consistency, accessibility, UI scalability, and essential features. With 100+ inputs from 20+ contributors, I designed practical enhancements that aligned with player expectations and extraction shooter genre.
I combined gameplay footage analysis with structured community feedback through collaborative sessions on FigJam. By mapping interactions across 50+ game screenshots, I identified critical pain points and improvement opportunities without first-hand alpha access.
Through this activity, I managed to output 10+ redesigned interfaces addressing 20+ issues across six key areas: Main Menu, Runner Overview, Loadouts, Factions, Maps, and HUD. Each solution reduced interaction friction and enhanced information clarity while establishing a scalable system for Marathon's future additions.
Role
Lead UX Designer
Team
20+ Feedback contributors
1x Designer (me)
Year
2025
Process
Multiplayer brainstorming
I started the project by doing a content analysis of all the released footage, streams, Discord and Reddit feedback channels. But UX is even better with a bit of multiplayer, right? I looped the community from all the feedback channels by creating a Figma board and hosted 4 open sessions during the 1-week sprint to capture all the insights. Community collaboration wouldn't work with a blank canvas. So I set up a system.
Four simple categories to distinguish variety of community feedback:
Created a task flow and overall interaction map with 50+ screenshots of the game to contextualize their inputs:
After all the engagement, over 100 notes across the flow and endless conversations on Discord, I can confidently say it was well-received by the community:
Compiling insights into objectives
Within one week of this collaborative study, there were a 3 clear issues identified within the alpha build. TLDR: Player usability and familiarity with interactions in the extraction shooter genre:
Navigation & menu architecture |
|---|
Design consistency, scalability & accessibility |
Genre-specific feature adjustments |
Spearheading a rapid-fire R&D sprint without having first-hand access to the alpha build came with its own limitations. Hence, I scoped the exercise based on these principles:
Executable improvements vs. moon-shot concepts |
|---|
Key screens vs. screen states |
Contents within gameplay footage vs. discussion threads |
Design improvements
By leveraging the screenshots with some editing skills, I salvaged a design system to work on improved UI (some may appear a bit broken due to limitations in available assets):
Main Menu + Navigation
Consolidated the main menu and lobby screen to reduce redundancy + common interface practices in extraction shooter games
Runner Overview
Readjusted the layout and design to scale for future runner additions + upfront ability overview
Factions (Upgrades + Contracts)
Optimized UI by reducing the number of clicks to reach important pieces + layout exploration
Map + Mini-map
Adjusted the map UI to be consistent with the design + space efficient + added minimap UI to offload pings from cluttering the screen
HUD
Tweaked for design consistency + accessibility (repositioned ping/killfeed, removed item drop notifications, etc.)
Main Menu + Navigation
Consolidated the main menu and lobby screen to reduce redundancy + common interface practices in extraction shooter games
Runner Overview
Readjusted the layout and design to scale for future runner additions + upfront ability overview
Factions (Upgrades + Contracts)
Optimized UI by reducing the number of clicks to reach important pieces + layout exploration
Map + Mini-map
Adjusted the map UI to be consistent with the design + space efficient + added minimap UI to offload pings from cluttering the screen
HUD
Tweaked for design consistency + accessibility (repositioned ping/kill-feed, removed item drop notifications, etc.)
Outcome
This week-long exploration represents just the beginning of Marathon's UX evolution. With ~100 pieces of community feedback mapped to specific interfaces and 10+ comprehensive redesigns addressing over 20 identified pain points, I managed to establish a collaborative framework for further UX evaluations on the game.
As passionate as I am about Marathon, with its immensely comprehensive narrative, this activity is a proof of work to showcase my aptitude as a UX designer and my dedication to create better games.
Next up:
Hoping to get early access to the test builds to explore the game in detail
Work on other pieces that require design improvements
Find ways to share this with Design team at Bungie
Host more community sessions on game UX jams
Get hired by Bungie 👀
Curious to talk about this UX study in detail? Reach out!