Trust me, I’m definitely not a fan of unsolicited redesigns. I find that, usually, unsolicited redesigns tend to show very little respect for the original design team. A team that not only have the responsibility to design the product, but also have to deal with dozens of restrictions and particular cases always ignored in the typical redesign. Good job for that great looking dribbble shot, but you should know that designing a real full product is far away from that.

However, in this case, allow me to make an exception.

First of all because it is something that EA Sports has known for years and refuses to fix (messages about it are stacked in the forums), secondly because I am pretty sure I know the game inside out (I’ve been playing this damn series for 20 years) and last, but not least, I’m doing this for my friend Pablo, who always excuses his poor FIFA play in his colour blindness.

Current FIFA cursors

In FIFA every human controlled player have a pointer over his head (The Sims style), next image shows what you get when you play FIFA with three friends. I see some important issues with that…

First issue

The cursor colours have been chosen following the logic of a classical board game (red, blue, green and yellow) but, apparently, has not been taken into account that football is played over a large green area (!). Therefore the green player always have poor contrast over the pitch, nearly invisible in many cases.

Second issue

The cursor is also used to indicate when a player had been cautioned, by adding a yellow border to the shape. It’s not a bad idea but having a cursor already yellow rises the same problem of the previous example, there is not enough contrast.

To cap it all, yellow is used as well to indicate where the high balls will bounce, which can be mistaken with the yellow player cursor.

Third issue

About 6% of men suffer from red-green colour blindness, for them, ‘red’ and ‘green’ cursors are pretty much indistinguible.

My unsolicited redesign

Picking colours

In order to define four new colours first we need to take the colour wheel and remove the green ones to avoid camouflage with the pitch.

Also we need to remove yellow to avoid the conflict with the referee card and the high ball marker.

I also removed pink from the equation. It’s not a personal preference, I’ve been using pink as my personal brand for years, but FIFA is a game mainly played by males and, let’s face it, a lot of men still feel uncomfortable using ‘girly colours’ in western cultures.

It might not be politically correct but you can’t design a palette and factor out the reality of your user base. It’s hard enough to agree in the team selection to add fuel to the fire. Yes, It’s in the game.

The fantastic four

Without changing the shape or size of the cursors (I think they are very well designed) I have set the following color combination, keeping the classic red and blue for players one and two (it’s the most probable user case and there’s no problem at all with them) but adjusting their colour hue and improving the contrast between border and pitch.

Regarding the colours for players three and four, they needed to be replaced by two colours different from each other and from blue and red as well, so the four swatches are perfectly distinguishable from one another, just as the classic red, blue, green and yellow were.

Therefore I calculated the most distant swatches in the wheel whilst still visible for the colour blind, this is orange and cyan instead of green and yellow.

And this is how they’ll work in the wild…

My palette selection is probably not the prettiest in the world, I give you that, but I think it solves all three issues at once. Every cursor is now well distinguished over green grass, yellow cards and high balls are perfectly clear and it’s also colourblind-friendly (well, at least for the more extended kind).

And that’s pretty much it, another example of how even the most little detail can make a difference in a product with more than 100 million units sold since 1993.