Asphalt 8: Airborne took the Asphalt series to new heights with its jump-focused gameplay when it was released in August 2013 by Gameloft Barcelona.
It was taken over by Gameloft Kharkiv in 2015, and they’ve worked hard over the years to constantly improve our award-winning game. It’s been eight years since Asphalt 8: Airborne’s debut, but it’s still one of our most popular games today!
The game team in Kharkiv wanted to make Asphalt 8: Airborne’s 8th anniversary extra special this year with an ambitious project: giving the UI/UX a new, modern look and feel for a better and smoother gaming experience.
We spoke to Anastasiia Pogodina, Lead UI/UX Designer, about Asphalt 8: Airborne’s biggest update to date and how she and her team managed to modernize an eight-year-old UI/UX design.
Hi, Anastasiia! Tell us a little about yourself and your role at Gameloft.
My name is Anastasiia Pogodina, and I’m the lead UI/UX designer of Asphalt 8: Airborne at Gameloft Kharkiv.
As a UI/UX designer, my goal is to make players’ interaction with the game as seamless and clear as possible and to enhance their experience every step of the way. And as a team lead, I’m responsible for creating a friendly working environment where my team members are able to bring their valuable perspectives to our projects.
What defines great UI/UX?
UI/UX is a combination of various factors—like the screen composition, elements placements, and subtle button flares—that when taken as a whole, create smooth interactions with all the game systems.
Great UX is invisible. It’s self-explanatory, intuitive, user-friendly, and guides players by showing them the shortest way to their goals and ensuring they can get what they need without any mistakes. Players won’t remember any details though. The game will just feel right.
Why did you decide to update Asphalt 8: Airborne’s UI/UX?
August of 2021 marked eight years of Asphalt 8: Airborne, which is a considerable age for any mobile game, but games and technologies are evolving extremely fast. Something made five years or even a year ago might be outdated today, including the UI/UX!
We’ve been adding new features and enhancing the interface throughout all these years, and the UI inevitably became overcomplicated. Even though it’s familiar to older players, it can be confusing for new ones.
This is why we thought it was the perfect time to take a fresh look at Asphalt 8: Airborne and redesign the whole UI/UX, taking into account modern trends and the game’s current state and future plans to make it appealing for both loyal players and newcomers.
How did you and your team approach such a huge project?
It all started more than a year ago with the general idea to improve the Asphalt 8: Airborne experience.
The Design team was given total freedom to come up with proposals of what and how things could be modernized without breaking learned player behavior. So the great design conquest began with tons of brainstorms and competitor analyses.
We then defined general user flows and broke everything down into key nodes. From that moment on we worked in stages, moving from node to node, starting with the ones players spend more time in, like car garage and upgrades. Of course, each node had its specific problems to be solved.
The UI/UX team developed numerous interactive prototypes for each node to test new approaches, which is how we managed to reassemble key menus. But there’s still a lot of work and polishing to be done for upcoming updates and a lot of new ideas to test!
What were the main changes?
For a racing game with more than 300 vehicles, the garage is the most important aspect after the races. Players spend a lot of time interacting with their cars—tuning, coloring—so that was the starting point.
The next important feature was the play menu, which is a hub of all racing activities available to the player. We wanted to make it simple but catchy and to attract attention to new special events and car releases.
We also reworked and decluttered the main menu to create more space for players to feature their cars and brand new customizable avatars!
These four nodes (the garage, play menu, main menu, and avatar) and their junctions were our focus. And in addition to all these UX revamps, we also introduced a fresh new art style for the UI to make the game feel more modern.
Was there a particular feature you found especially important to revamp?
I’m happy with how we managed to achieve cohesion between the new screens. The old ones were a bit out of sync, so we tried to use the same interaction patterns to make the UI for the new screens more intuitive.
For example, modern devices have more elongated screens than before (think iPhone X vs. iPhone 5). Taking this into account, we rearranged navigation elements, like the old horizontal bottom bars to vertical tabs on the sides of the screen, to make them easier to reach.
We also tried a new approach with vertical scrolls and animations to interact with different layers of content, which is hard to describe but feels really cool. Everyone should install the game and try it!
What was the most challenging part about this project?
There were plenty of challenges, but one of the biggest was the pandemic and the transition to the new work-from-home reality.
From a design and development perspective, it was to not break everything that had being working before. There were many legacy solutions from previous updates and most of them had been implemented by people who left the project years ago, so we basically created everything from scratch.
When creating from scratch you have more freedom, but you’re also a bit in the dark trying to predict players’ behavior, goals and needs. On the other hand, improving on an existing UX gives you a solid understanding of your player’s flow state, but at the same time, you have to keep all their developed habits in mind.
It’s easier to teach players something completely new than make them relearn something they’ve being doing for years, so designers should apply changes carefully and make sure they’re not “breaking” the game for existing players.
Finally, what are you most proud of?
I’m proud of the team for having the courage to take this project on with me! The pandemic made things difficult—many of us felt lonely, there was a lack of communication, and it felt like the finish line was far, far away—but we supported each other both professionally and personally throughout the entire project.
It’s an honor to work with such amazing people and to see how they manage to find the best solution for any problem. Our game looked more and more like what it was supposed to become every single day, and I counted the days, hours, and minutes until the release.
I want to thank the whole Asphalt 8: Airborne team and to everyone else who helped release the greatest update ever. You’re all awesome professionals, and I’m proud to work alongside you. Let’s keep on doing great stuff!
Anastasiia and the rest of the Asphalt 8: Airborne team still have a lot they want to try out and implement in upcoming updates. Be sure to download Asphalt 8: Airborne on the App Store and Google Play, and follow them on Facebook to keep up to date on all their activities!