How Call of Duty: World War 2's UI/UX Stunts Map Selection
Call of Duty: World War 2 (WWII) is the most recent expansion to the Call of Duty series, and certainly has gone through its fair share of UI/UX experimentation — but I propose that its menuing, while sleek, does not completely emphasize all of its features effectively.
Navigating between menus at the top is fair — you know exactly what you’re getting, and can quickly get there through the bumper buttons on your controller. Once a player goes to each menu once, they will know where to go, but the elements within each section are still hidden until further inspection; therefore, this UI is not as learnable as it is memorable and efficient. In the event that you want to navigate to a specific menu, it is labeled in a way that endorses efficiency and quickly updating classes and settings between matches. Its memorability is excellent because all elements are labeled with not only its function or content, but also with buttons — this, however, is also WWII’s lobby screen’s biggest fault.
The developers of this UI likely opted for its design due to the general theme of the game and current design trends in games. Developers are opting for incredibly clean and minimalist designs in interest of showcasing visually appealing graphics, and Call of Duty moved towards a more simple look with WWII. It makes sense, then, to store different menus and options within button bindings and clean menuing.
Well, almost. WWII’s lobby screen has one fatal flaw: the average player does not clearly see map information and is not being reminded of voting. In the bottom left hand of the screen, the player is able to vote between three maps, where a sub-menu pops up and displays the maps in question, along with current votes. From the designers perspective, they likely wanted to allow all players in the match to be displayed in the lobby background, and therefore could not include elements in the center of the screen.
The above UI is arguably the perfect solution to that; it’s a popup that, once triggered, emphasizes you’re currently selecting a map. However, if its goal is to get players to choose a map, then it completely fails. Out of 11 people in the second picture, only 1 person voted and that was xRuthlessTruthX, who was disturbed enough to make a tutorial video about how to vote for a map.
The UI issue that is evidently hindering map select’s success can be remedied by relying on affordances from previous Call of Duty titles. Every year, a new Call of Duty iteration is released.
In previous games, map select was displayed very clearly and emphasized with pictures representing each stage by default. I believe that by taking advantage of past map select design that is more apparent (and therefore utilizing affordances) would engage more users with an important feature of the game.
Each individual game takes place on a specific map, so it is imperative to have a user participate in that choice. I propose that the map select should be simply be displayed at all times in the bottom left, but in smaller boxes than when popped up. Additionally, because the user’s “cursor” does not have a focus on this screen in the original, the user will now be defaulted to a focus on map select, which can be chosen with “X,” and is indicated by the yellow outline of the map. Doing so results in a scenario where the user is able to quickly select a map, and is reminded of map choice each time they play.
Call of Duty: World War II’s menu design is sleek and emphasizes the graphics capabilities of our time, but lacks when it comes to getting users to take advantage of map selection.