Animal Crossing and Information Architecture
One game that has become a sensation during the Covid-19 pandemic is Animal Crossing New Horizon. And when Animal Crossing comes up often people online are speaking to the fact that while the game is fantastic in so many ways, there is definitely some quality of life updates that need to be assessed. And those quality of life changes have been popping up all over the internet, so I wanted to take a stab at it myself. I took to twitter to learn more about inventories in general, and what came flooding in was feedback on what Animal Crossing has gotten wrong. From asking twitter I received the following information about Animal Crossing:
- No sorting in personal inventory
- No way to pull materials from house inventory during crafting
- No searching (searching by theme, main material, name)
- Stacks of similar items are limited and inconsistent from different types of items
- Can’t select multiple items at a time to drop all at once
- Poorly organized house and DIY inventories (non specific labels “misc” and “other”)
This was quite a beefy list of problems and I decided it would be best to tackle just a few of these that would address some of the inconsistencies between inventories and make an immediate quality of life change for all types of players. Additionally I really wanted to focus on the information architecture of the game as I felt that was something that had been overlooked. Those changes were:
- Sorting in personal inventory
- Changing labels in DIY and House Inventories to be more specific
Sorting in personal inventory
This change would be a huge quality of life change as it would save players time when looking for items within their personal inventory and allow players to not spend time moving items around in their inventory. The sort function that I’ve created would move all items to the top slots in the inventory and sort the items by a certain category. After doing some card sorting the best categories were determined to be:
- Type
- Alphabetical
- Time (when was it added to inventory)
I created frames in Figma to demonstrate how this would work and what it would look like:
Here we can see a personal inventory that hasn’t been sorted yet. The new sort button, Y, has been added to this screen. In the house and DIY inventories the sort function already exists and it is the Y button so I just moved that over to personal inventories as well.
When a player would press the Y button an overlay would slide and fade in on the left side of the screen to inform the player how their inventory was being sorted. Pressing Y would sort it again in a new fashion. There would be no way to “unsort” the inventory so the player would have to settle for one of the categories. This is the design convention in the other inventories as well
And you here you have the inventory sorted perfectly by type! Creating a clear and easier to read inventory.
New Inventory Labels
In both the DIY recipe inventory and the house inventory screens there are labels to help sort items.
The labels for DIY initially were:
- Everything
- Tools
- Housewares
- Misc
- Wall Hangings
- Wallpaper/Floors
- Accessories
- Other
- Craftable
- Seasonal
- Favorites
After card sorting I determined that housewares was too large of an umbrella term. It covered everything from beds and chairs to farm silos and fountains. Additionally I looked up what is typically defined as a houseware and it’s anything from pots and pans, to vacuums, to small appliances. Currently Animal Crossing had items typically defined as housewares in both the housewares label and the misc label. I decided to remove the housewares, misc, and other labels and change them to furniture, outdoor, and housewares. Furniture would be any large placable furniture item, outdoor would be items such as fencing (previously in the other category), silos, barrels, fountains, campfires, and yard decorations. This sorting would rely on typically defined terms from outside of the game but it would also better utilize the spaces. Lastly housewares would become the area for small house decorations and appliances. Removing misc and other would remove confusion from the inventory system as it is hard to determine what is misc and what is other. Additionally items that were previously in other were mostly moved into tools as they are items that the player utilizes/consumes such as musical instruments and medicine.
The labels for the house inventory initially were:
- Everything
- Housewares
- Misc
- Wallhangings
- Wallpaper
- Floors
- Rugs
- Fashion items
- Creatures
- Other
Once again this inventory had the large umbrella term of housewares, and two non descript categories in misc and other. I utilized the same conventions from the DIY and changed housewares to furniture, misc to housewares, added outdoors, and combined wallpapers and floors. Creating convention between the two categories will limit player confusion and that overall creates a better experience.
Takeaways
This project was odd for me because it was a huge concentration on Information Architecture. Something I always pay attention to in all of my projects, but not something that is typically the main focus of my project. Next steps would be to go back to the list initially constructed from user feedback and research more into what creating larger and consistent stacks would look like as well as what pulling materials from within the house inventory into crafting would be like. Lastly I would love to take these new changes back to my initial users I talked to and see what they have to say about the changes.
