Reorganizing the X8 main menu.

Player feedback through the X8 Discord, in-game guerrilla observation, and team consensus all pointed to the same problem: the main menu felt scattered. Tab grouping was inconsistent, related options lived in different places, and players had to develop tribal knowledge to find what they wanted.

Rather than redesign from gut, I ran the work. The community was right there in Discord; the methods were familiar; the only real constraint was time, which is why I leaned on fast, structured techniques instead of long-cycle research.

Every main-menu option and tab became a card. Open recruitment from the X8 Discord — real users of the game, voluntarily sorting on their own time.

Used Casolysis to pull out the hierarchy and grouping signal from the participant data. Where players consistently grouped items together, the IA should reflect it. Where players diverged, the choice needed to come from design intent backed by a defensible read of the data.

The deliverable to engineering wasn't a redesign — it was a map of the change. A Figma file with the existing IA on the left and the new IA on the right, with colour-coded arrows showing what moves where. Engineers could see “this tab goes there” in one glance.

Comparable views of the same tab before and after, side by side. The kind of artifact that resolves the question “is this actually simpler?” without requiring the reader to mentally diff the two.

The reorganized IA is in X8. Tabs are grouped according to the card-sort findings. The migration doc made the engineering implementation a follow-the-arrows exercise rather than an interpretation exercise.