Steelseries
Redesigning the software that powers gamings most popular peripherals.
In 2017, I spent a month on a design vision for the future of SteelSeries software. The goal was to present a unified vision of software, ecommerce, and gaming news while also addressing common user problems.
Rethinking the “Gear” page
The most common reason to use the SteelSeries Engine software was to update your hardware configurations. Want to customize your RBG colors or mouse settings? That’s what the software was there to help with.
The existing version of this screen made it difficult to know what was connected and what wasn’t.
The redesigned page separates the devices that are connected and reuses the marketing image for easier identification when accessing the software in the middle of a game.
Configuring a device
Devices have a range of options to configure. Button configurations, settings, illumination, macro’s and more.
The existing verison of this screen presented all of these at once and made the UI overwhelming. The information was also made harder to understand with abbreviations like B1 and a “Top/Left/Right” view which didn’t change the UI in any meaningful way.
The redesigned page separates these settings into categories, streamlines some of the more obtuse UI, and was designed to be reusable across other types of devices to provide consistency between editing a headset or a mouse.
Bringing platforms together
The last major goal of this redesign vision excercise was to integrate the SteelSeries e-commerce site into their software.
This meant creating new surfaces for the shop and for the SteelSeries blog. It also meant updating the navigation to account for more places within the product.
The goal was to make an flywheel of users who purchase hardware > download software > promote new hardware > repeat.
Launch
As I mentioned earlier, this project was ultimately a vision excercise as the team didn’t end up having the engineering resources to pursue it.
If we did have resources, my next steps would have been to establish a design system, finish designing some missing states, and start validating design changes with user testing or experimentation.
If you’d like to read a different project that did ship, check out my case studies below.
