Animal Crossing Redesign

Problem

Animal Crossing is a new and joyful game that has many great and new features, however it has flaws when it comes to inventory management and information architecture.

Solution

Create new categories and allow sorting in all inventories to allow users to more easily organize and find items within their inventories.

One game that has become a sensation during the Covid-19 pandemic is Animal Crossing New Horizon. And when Animal Crossing comes up often people online are speaking to the fact that while the game is fantastic in so many ways, there is definitely some quality of life updates that need to be assessed. I took to twitter to find out what could be changed, specifically in regards to the inventories. From asking twitter I received the following information:

No sorting in personal inventory
No way to pull materials from house inventory during crafting
No searching (searching by theme, main material, name)
Stacks of similar items are limited and inconsistent from different types of items
Can’t select multiple items at a time to drop all at once
Poorly organized house and DIY inventories (non specific labels “misc” and “other”)

This was quite a beefy list of problems and I decided it would be best to tackle just a few of these that would address some of the inconsistencies between inventories and make an immediate quality of life change for all types of players. Those changes were:

Sorting in personal inventory

Changing labels in DIY and House Inventories to be more specific

Sorting in personal inventory

This change would be a huge quality of life change as it would save players time when looking for items within their personal inventory and allow players to not spend time moving items around in their inventory. The sort function that I’ve created would move all items to the top slots in the inventory and sort the items by a certain category. After doing some card sorting the best categories were determined to be:

Type
Alphabetical
Time (when was it added to inventory)

I created frames in Figma to demonstrate how this would work and what it would look like:

Here we can see a personal inventory that hasn’t been sorted yet. The new sort button, Y, has been added to this screen in the bottom right corner. In the house and DIY inventories the sort function already exists and it is the Y button so I just moved that over to personal inventories as well.

When a player would press the Y button an overlay would slide and fade in on the left side of the screen to inform the player how their inventory was being sorted. Pressing Y would sort it again in a new fashion. There would be no way to “unsort” the inventory so the player would have to settle for one of the categories. This is the design convention in the other inventories as well

And you here you have the inventory sorted perfectly by type! Creating a clear and easier to read inventory.

New Inventory Labels

In both the DIY recipe inventory and the house inventory screens there are labels to help sort items.

The labels for DIY initially were:

Everything
Tools
Housewares
Misc
Wall Hangings
Wallpaper/Floors
Accessories
Other
Craftable
Seasonal
Favorites

After card sorting I determined that housewares was too large of an umbrella term. It covered everything from beds and chairs to farm silos and fountains. Additionally I looked up what is typically defined as a houseware and it’s anything from pots and pans, to vacuums, to small appliances. Currently Animal Crossing had items typically defined as housewares in both the housewares label and the misc label. I decided to remove the housewares, misc, and other labels and change them to furniture, outdoor, and housewares. Furniture would be any large placable furniture item, outdoor would be items such as fencing (previously in the other category), silos, barrels, fountains, campfires, and yard decorations. This sorting would rely on typically defined terms from outside of the game but it would also better utilize the spaces. Lastly housewares would become the area for small house decorations and appliances. Removing misc and other would remove confusion from the inventory system as it is hard to determine what is misc and what is other. Additionally items that were previously in other were mostly moved into tools as they are items that the player utilizes/consumes such as musical instruments and medicine.

The labels for the house inventory initially were:

Everything
Housewares
Misc
Wallhangings
Wallpaper
Floors
Rugs
Fashion items
Creatures
Other

Once again this inventory had the large umbrella term of housewares, and two non descript categories in misc and other. I utilized the same conventions from the DIY and changed housewares to furniture, misc to housewares, added outdoors, and combined wallpapers and floors. Creating convention between the two categories will limit player confusion and that overall creates a better experience.

Takeaways

This project was odd for me because it was a huge concentration on Information Architecture. Something I always pay attention to in all of my projects, but not something that is typically the main focus of my project. Next steps would be to go back to the list initially constructed from user feedback and research more into what creating larger and consistent stacks would look like as well as what pulling materials from within the house inventory into crafting would be like. Lastly I would love to take these new changes back to my initial users I talked to and see what they have to say about the changes.