Menus & Entries

Unity Design System - Product Design

Project Overview

Over the course of 2023, I lead an initiative at Unity Technologies to update the right-click context menus of the Unity Editor out of the OS API and into our internal UI API. This work included defining the appearance and layout of the menus, updating functionality based on competitive comparison, and documenting all new definitions and features in the company Design System.

My Contributions

For this project, I created and maintained the source-of-truth Figma mock ups and components in our Figma library. I authored and edited the content for the Design System page entry, I handed off specifications to the developer team, and worked closely on iterations and improvements during our beta testing period for Unity Editor 2023.3.

Unity Technologies

Senior Product Designer
Menus & Entries

Feb 2023 - Sept 2023

My design process started by identifying the requirements inside of the editor, as well as the common functionalities and guidance from other software's functional menus. This process included working with user research and analytics teams to identify common user profiles and frequent user actions. I gathered a list of other internal teams who had a high interest in the functionality, and met with partner functions to confirm my understanding of their needs. I also referenced available sources such as Nielsen Norman Group, Apple HIG, and Microsoft Windows guidelines.

I then defined the foundational parameters such as anatomy, layout, window spawning positioning, and UI color palettes for both a light and dark theme. I created animated mock ups in Figma to display my intended workflows and definitions, and presented this to my design team and my engineering team for feedback as well as planning for implementation tasks. There were several reviews of this stage with VPs and directors of my organizational team to increase awareness and visibility of tasks. Internal teams were given access to the mocks, as well as recorded presentation videos, to provide feedback on a wide scale.

Once the iterations in Figma were completed, I created an outline of the content needed for the Design System website and worked with technical writers to ensure that the organization of the content was correct. I also brought this stage of specifications to my engineering team to make sure all necessary information was provided and questions were answered. I worked with my partner engineers to build local copies of the test branch so I could test and confirm the final code for myself. Once I approved it, we opened the branch to other teams for internal integration testing and finalizing the API and feature set required.Finally, the content was created and added to the Design System website, which is managed using WebFlow.

During the process of populating the web page, I worked closely with available technical writers to ensure the documentation is clear, concise, and useful. This page is currently internal only, and will go live on the public instance of the site when this feature is available in an LTS release version.