TopSpin 2K25

TopSpin 2K25 revived a classic tennis series after more than a decade. I joined the four-role UX/UI pod mid-production, as a designer and as a lead.

UX was the newest discipline on the team. Nobody owned UX yet, there was no shared UX vision, time was running out, and UX had become the bottleneck that UI art and engineering were waiting on. The pod mixed internal staff and external vendors across several time zones.

UX designer and lead in a UX/UI pod made of UI art (vendors and our internal UI lead), UI engineering, a dedicated UX/UI producer and UX designers spread across vendors and time zones.

• Ran a fresh-eyes audit of the workflow, talking to colleagues in every discipline to find the recurring blockers.
• Set clear goals: make game design aware of UX improvements in line with business goals, and unify the process with UI art and UI engineering.
• Adopted the UI lead's Figma structure and extended it so every feature showed its status and every decision was archived.
• Worked closely with the UX/UI producer and joined every design meeting the schedule allowed.
• Proposed bringing the remote teams together in person for two to three weeks. Working, eating and talking together sped up the process, produced better ideas and let UX unblock the other departments.

The co-location sprint unblocked the UX bottleneck and the game launched on 26 April 2024 on PC, PlayStation and Xbox. It was nominated for Best Sports/Racing Game at The Game Awards 2024, and I shared the process in a talk at Game Access 2024.

Sometimes the best UX fix is a process fix. Treat vendors as part of the team, delegate with context, keep track of decisions, and make it normal to revisit closed features.